Proximity
by shelter
Summary: Claymore Short Story Project #1. A series of 10 one-shots/ short stories written around the theme of proximity - for some warriors closeness is an ideal, for others it is a curse. The project is COMPLETE!
1. Burden

**PROXIMITY**

**Claymore Short Story Project #1**

Credit goes to all the writers at Animesuki who helped me with technical editing & plot development: _T35, Yosei, Hell, Fenrir, Tenken, NobodyMan, Mikke & Bishou_...Hope I didn't leave out anyone. Also to _Dreamreaper _who has been bugging me to post something new :)

* * *

**Burden**

**1.**

Number 8 "Windcutter" Flora carried with her a tiny wooden cross. It was strung through the centre by thin, fraying leather rawhide, and she had connected the ends in a hasty knot to create a loop. The loop was large enough for her to wear the cross around her neck. But that was against the Organization's regulations, so instead she kept the cross stuffed in the hilt of her sword, with her Black Card.

When she and her team rested for the night, she would take out the cross. She would examine its chipped edges, and run her thumb down the contours of the now worn away figure in the middle. She would make sure no one saw her with it. They might interpret her obsession with the symbol as a sign of weakness, as proof that she was not an able leader. So she always kept the object stowed away.

Sometimes when she was certain she was alone, she would wear the object, looping the ends around her neck. It would fall and hang loose just above the symbol of identification the Organization had given her. She kept the cross, and wore it sometimes, not because she was religious. She could hardly tell what the word "religion" meant. But the cross had belonged to a young gentleman from a village in the far south. She had cleansed the young man's town of yoma, saved him from his yoma posing as his neighbours. At the end of the assignment, the young gentleman had offered her the tiny wooden cross as a token of thanks. Purely symbolic, he had said, but more so because you have a beautiful soul that bears much burden. She had waved him off, and told him to submit all payments to the Organization's man in black. But she kept the cross. And she often wondered about that young gentleman.

It was uncommon for her kind to receive gracious comments of thanks. His token gesture (purely symbolic, was it?) was her first, and her only one. She kept the gift stashed away. But sometimes she would wear it, adorn herself with it, wondering loftily and idly, but wondering, whether that young gentleman had worn it also, and if he did so, she wondered if the cross hung right in the space right under his neck, and she wondered if he often caressed, and ran his hands over it like she did. And she often held the object in her palm, knowing it had once belonged to him, and that his human hands radiating their human warmth must have done the same.

* * *

**2.**

They were called Claymores. Most of them bore the name without complaint.

They bore the name like it was their label, like there was no other way to describe the occupation they committed themselves to do. They bore it with a muted indifference. Some bore it gladly. But most could not really care.

Most of the things they were burdened with were the results of combat requirement, the necessity in being a Claymore. They bore on their shoulders splaulders, twin blades of cast iron armour, which were heavy, but felt much heavier during hunts and missions. They bore on their arms vambraces, so that a desperate yoma could not wound their exposed arms. They had to strap them in place, yet during fierce battles they always ensured the exposed area where arm braces and the splauders met were always covered.

All of them bore the weight of metal sabatons, and the click click click of metal against earth when they made their long trips. Any footwear would've been fine, but it was standard issue from the Organization, and it added more weight to each foot. They were tough to run in, and weighed more in the water. As a final compliment to their armour, all of them wore faulds, the metal skirt meant to protect their thighs. They bore all that arnour silently, many believing its weight would mean the difference between life and death should the critical moment come.

They bore the standard list of stipulated items their handlers supplied them. They had been trained never to leave their contact points without these: a black cloak and several yoki suppressant pills. Most carried five, enough for a week. But the exact number of pills they were allowed to carry depended mostly on preference. Number 47 Clare carried fifteen pills. Number 3 Galatea carried only one. For the sake of emergency, I always carried ten. As for the black cloak, most carried with should the need to mix and mingle with humans arose. But it could serve other purposes too. For example, when Number 46 Eugenia was killed, Flora and her team wrapped her body in her black cloak and then buried her.

Most importantly, all of them bore the weight of that unmistakable sword, that deadly blade, their Claymore. It sheath they strapped to their armour, and with the Claymore in it, it weighed at least one stone. It was a willful, unfortunate burden they had to carry. It was by all accounts the heaviest burden of all. So much so that when Number 46 Eugenia was killed she fell under the weight of all that armour – and never got up again. Burdened to the point of death, one of her comrades had said.

By the time they had graduated from the academy, most of them could already bear the weight of that massive sword on one hand. In the case of Number 9 Jean, they said she had become adept at using her Claymore with both hands during her academy days – a skill only one or two in a generation would acquire. Then there was Number 11 Undine, who carried two Claymores, and she used them on anyone who challenged her self-imposed strongest of the Claymores title.

They bore their responsibilities to the Organization and humankind without so much as a complaint. And they bore themselves with a quiet understanding of the weaponry they could unleash.

* * *

**3.**

Flora bore the heavy, pressing weight of armour and weaponry during an Awakened Being hunt in the Southwest. With three fellow warriors – Number 17 Eliza, Number 24 Zelda and Number 46 Eugenia – they bore their equipment and armour and silence and contempt for their Awakened foe across three provinces, nine days of travel on foot, across streams and up mountains and through the valleys which followed. This was the country they knew well – the country of the sword, the country ruled by sword and yoma.

They had not talked much. All they needed were introductions and queries about ranks to establish who would lead the hunt. Throughout their nine days' trek, led by Flora and a persistent order to eliminate a rogue Awakened Being, they did not talk much. They did not know it then, but one would not make it out of the hunt alive, and the other three would not talk about the hunt till their reunion in Pieta.

As they stopped for their final rest on their seventh day, Flora had quietly excused herself from the detail. She was not in the mood to talk. She had known all three of them for only a week anyway, and their socializing had consisted of nothing more than walking.

Away from prying eyes she had unlocked the hilt of her sword, and she fished out the wooden cross. For a while she imagined the young gentleman, his wowed eyes, his gentleman's gait, his soft-spoken tone. She imagined the young gentleman as he had strode up to her, unafraid of the stains of yoma blood on her tunic or debris of slaughtered yoma strewn all around her feet. She imagined him as he placed his gift into her open palms, brushing his hands against hers. Would he have felt how delicate her small hands were? Would he have seen the hands of human, and not a Claymore?

She imagined these things as she held the small wooden cross up to the light of the falling sun. Some birds were arguing in the trees nearby, and she was sure her comrades were not watching. So she slipped the cross over her head and wore the object, displaying proudly what was – and would be – the only gift she would have ever received from a human.

* * *

**4.**

They bore their burdens silently, mutely, for there was no one to tell, and there was no one to listen – save each other.

To some extent some of the things they bore were unnecessary, part of their imagination, mere good luck charms to keep their mind off the numbing repetition of missions. As the highest ranked of her team, Flora had her tiny wooden cross. Flora did not know it then, but before she died Number 46 Eugenia always carried with her a handwritten note from a fellow trainee. Number 24 Zelda was in the habit of plucking flowers, especially dandelions, and curling their little stems around the hilt of her Claymore, even in the midst of battle. Number 22 Helen carried extra rations, mostly in the form of apples. Number 31 Tabitha would pick mint leaves off the shrubs and crush them in her hands. She honestly believed they would bring her good luck in battle. Before she was killed in the northern skirmish, Number 7 Eva would anoint her Claymore with fresh water before going into a fight.

And Number 47 Clare bore the weight of a human life – a boy named Raki – willingly, beautifully (and some would say lovingly) through battle, hardship and separation.

Call it superstition, but they were Claymores, and they believed no power would save them, no divine hand could rescue them, save their own belief in such meaningless, pointless rituals. The mere act of doing them kept their mind away from the horrible reality of being killed on a mission, or worse, awakening to a general darkness, a sharpened sense of desire and a voracious hunger for human flesh.

And so many of these superstitions passed into lore, and eventually became the truth, the means to which these young women lived their short, anguished, blood-filled lives.

* * *

**5.**

On the ninth day, Flora and her team were ambushed by an Awakened Being.

Early in the morning, along a rocky stream – it used the cover of the long grass to launch an attack which separated Flora from her team. The monster was not very smart, and from what Number 17 Eliza said, the battle just took a mere fifteen minutes, and a double onslaught of Flora's signature move – the "Windcutter" – before the creature was reduced to a lonely blinking head in the middle of that distant meadow.

But before it attacked, Flora was not thinking about the mission, neither was she thinking about her team-mates. She had ventured ahead, lost in the morning and the meadow and the scenery, lost in her thoughts. At that very instance, moments before the Awakening Being attacked, Flora would admit she was thinking about the wooden cross dangling from her neck, the young gentleman who had probably worn it below his shy smiling face and the way his hands had probably caressed the wooden emblem whenever he was deep in thought – like she was doing now –

And then the Awakened Being struck.

It looked like an ordinary yoma. Only bigger, with a tough outer carapace of hardened spikes and armour, and longer arms. It had extended its fingers in its first attack. But by making the first move it had given away its position, and standing out from the tall grass like a sore thumb, Flora could sense the uneven yoki, its indecision.

Her hands were still pressed over that tiny wooden cross hanging around her neck as she recalled their battle strategy: in pairs, attack the monster from both sides. But now separated from her other three teammates by the yoma's extended fingers, she was exposed, alone, an easy kill. Without thinking she motioned for Eliza and Zelda to engage, and for Eugenia to join her. And they obeyed.

It all happened very fast. Eliza and Zelda sprung at the monster. Eugenia used this distraction to join Flora. The Awakened Being saw the move. It struck its arm out at Eugenia. Its fingers extended. One hit her square between the eyes. She stopped running and, weighed by all that armour, fell down and did not get up.

For a short moment Flora could not believe what had happened.

But being a leader, she had a mission: kill first, then tend her teammate later. After all, Eugenia was just injured, wasn't she? So she advanced, and when she was in range, drew her sword at the monster so fast that the offending arm that had struck at Eugenia disintegrated. Eliza and Zelda had made short work of the other. Outnumbered and limbless, the monster made a foolish attempt to run, but Flora, frowning for the first time, struck one last time, cleaving its legs at the knees. And Eliza and Zelda chopped all the way up, leaving a torso and a head lying in the grass.

Zelda wondered if Eugenia was all right. Worried that she had not seen her, Flora would have walked back to where her teammate – the lowest and weakest of her team – was lying motionless in the grass. Her hands would have been still clasped around her sword, all her armour would have not been penetrated. But her entire right cheekbone would have been blown away, and Flora would have grimly pulled out the monster's finger from Eugenia's face. It had gone clean through the bridge of her nose, exiting her temple at the other end. There was hardly any blood. It was a clean kill.

And Flora screamed. A long, single chorus of unrestrained anger.

* * *

**6.**

Together, as sisters, they bore the stigma of being a Claymore. They all bore the burden of being thought of as more monster than human.

They would walk among humans using every restraint and every last bit of their self-control, bearing the names they would hear whispered from the tongues of frightened men, jealous women, angry mothers and crying children. _Witch, demon, monster, beast, infidel, jezebel, temptress, scum, heathen, unsaved, killer, evil one, dweller of the dark, child of the devil._ They bore the names; they bore the collective shame and scorn; they bore the disdain, the hate of their fellow humans.

They bore their public disgrace in private, moving from town to town, killing the same foe, mission after mission, a continuous eternal cycle of service for those who hardly gave a word of thanks.

And they bore the tense burden, the immediate fear of waking up to become something that they were not. Something darker, more sinister than their own public degradation – the personal descent of the soul, the going-under into a point of no return, the giving in to the indwelling of an evil spirit, which made them do things that they had been taught as abominable, the very things they were meant to protect humanity against.

* * *

**7.**

As Flora prepared Eugenia's body for burial she wrapped her comrade in the black cloak, and ordered Eliza and Zelda to prepare a shallow grave. She removed the black card from the hilt of Eugenia's sword. And there she found two pieces of parchment, yellowed and torn, as thin as leaf, filled with unintelligible scribbling, in a language Flora herself could not understand.

As she removed all of Eugenia's armour, as they lowered her into the grave, as Zelda insisted on plucking flowers and lining the grave with it (because ditching a body into a hole in the earth was just wrong, she insisted), as Flora took the letters, the mysterious good luck charm that had helped Eugenia survive until now – she wondered how things would have been different had she been paying attention, had she not been thinking about that young gentleman, about her own token symbol.

But there was nothing to be done now, and there was nothing that could be undone either. All there was to do was for Flora to return to headquarters at Staff and report another Claymore killed in combat and return her comrade's black card to her handler. But for now, as they sunk the sword atop Eugenia's grave, Flora stooped low at the freshly dug earth, her fingers running over the wooden emblem still hanging from her neck. Zelda was plucking flowers. Eliza stood nearby. None spoke, not wanting to appear impatient.

* * *

**8.**

But above all their burdens, the weight of their own armour, the loads heaped upon them by their human brethren out of spite, they bore their own personal grievances. They bore ambition, grievances, personal trauma, promises of their fellow slain, and most of all, revenge.

Flora bore the burden of her own mistakes, and the resolve not to put the lives of those under her in danger. Number 11 Undine, strongest of the Claymores she might have been, bore the desire to feel strong, and in doing so wipe away that treacherous feeling of helpless weakness. Number 15 Deneve bore a similar helplessness: a crazed self-destructive guilt which, she claims, is as threatening an emotion as awakening. And they all bore their tragedies: yoma intruders consuming family members, brothers, sisters, mothers, husbands – the unforgotten fear, the panic, pure and undefiled, and the blurring of all memories with tears. They drove some into recklessness: before she died, Number 46 Eugenia's held bitterly onto one wish – to live out the promises detailed in the letters which she carried, to have her own family, to be admired for being a young lady, to laugh and not be laughed at.

But she did not get to fulfill that promise.

* * *

**9.**

In the evening after they had buried Eugenia, the remaining three warriors from the hunting team gathered around a fire. Flora kept watch all night, even after sleep overtook both Eliza and Zelda.

Then she opened the hilt of her sword, took out the wooden cross and the pieces of parchment she had found with Eugenia. She cast the parchment into the fire, watching the flames lick the browned paper into ashes. She watched gingerly as the ashes died in the glow. And then she thumbed the wooden cross, and burned it too.

Morning would come, she knew, and they would have to trek nine days back to their rendezvous, and perhaps several more to reach Staff. She would report Eugenia's death. She would take full responsibility for the error, for her dead comrade. Whether or not she would receive a censure she didn't bother, at least not then. She was a team leader: she needed to show both Eliza and Zelda she was capable of accepting her duties.

She was also a Claymore, and warriors such as her had no need for dreams. No need for crosses or flowers or letters written on parchment. No need for fantasies involving grateful young gentlemen from previous missions. No need for thanks or sympathy or empathy or grace. The mission – yes – all that mattered was the mission. Kill the yoma.

Yes, that was all that mattered.

* * *

_Edited: 01 Sep 2008. First posted on Animesuki. _


	2. Rag

**2. Rag**

_This was supposed to go up on Wednesday. But school is taking its toll on my editing. _

* * *

**1.**

"You know what they will do to you."

The look in Clare's eyes was absolute: she did not even accept my proposition. Or my concern. Or my worry. Or advice. She simply acted like she had not heard a single word spoken for her well-being.

"Clare? Do you understand?"

"Do I look like someone who cares?"

Those words she polished with the finest edge of brash carelessness: her trademark spark of straightforward confidence.

"But –"

She began to walk away, the thin scowl on her face unchanged.

"Clare, you're not listening to me –"

"You want me to tell the instructors that I'm unwell, and skip training?" her voice lost slipped into mild frustration – I could tell – hardening into a demand, almost as if she was being forced into a position she despised. "You want me to play dead?"

"Yes."

Her back facing me, she remained silent, staring at the exit to our quarters.

"It's only one training day, Clare. It's not like you'll lose anything from it." I said, laying my words into the realm of her rigid consideration.

"Clare?"

"I'm going, Elena."

Why are you always so stubborn?

And my mouth followed in response: "Clare –"

"Stop."

She already had her hand on her wooden practice sword. She faced me, the decision settled, her look as determined as a suicide. That was the last word, I knew – anything more and she would just walk out of our quarters without another word. I clenched my right fist – Clare, you stubborn idiot – then released it, as Clare tossed me my practice sword.

With it came her flailing hand, a lingering touch of reassurance, messily ruffling my hair. Behind the motion of her hand brushing through my fringe, she wore a sub-confident smile, faintly lighting up her face.

But she did not follow up with encouraging words, just more defiance:

"I care not what they do to me."

* * *

**2.**

The training academy at the City of Staff is a factory: here the Organization trains young girls (fused with monsters' flesh) to become future warriors, silver-eyed killing machines, for the good of the human race. Whenever we imagine the brutal regimen of our training, surely one the graduated seniors, on their return visits or off-tour duties, will always tell us that nothing is more brutal than liberating a town from yoma, our eternal enemies, the monsters we will be drilled to fight till we lose control of ourselves. They tell us, too, of the present threat of succumbing to our beastly nature by accident, claiming the big, dark world beyond the Academy is sinister, malevolent, hopeless – reading off a growing list of more carefully worded adjectives meant for maximum shock effect.

Often I want to disagree.

The academy in Staff, though, is full of contradictions. _Nothing is more valuable and important than human blood_, our instructors insist, _so protect all humans_. Yet humans would cast a stone, or mutter a prayer against evil, if a warrior stepped to close. _Sisters should look out for each other_, the director of the academy, a short shadow of a man named Rubel, says. Yet within the walls we beat, kick, spit, and fight each other for that illustrious chance to be deployed.

And then, despite being literally immortal, ageless, forever youthful, the elder sisters adhere to this pointless ritual passed down from generation after generation of unknown seniors, playing with us under the excuse that _no one is excused from ritual_.

For the entire afternoon, we trained in wistful silence among the floor of battling pairs, all trainees spread out in the open verandah facing the spur-green training grounds. Sparring grimly with Clare, within our circle of ducks, swordplay and strikes, we seemed to hide our reservations with the repetitive clacking of our fake wooden swords. Whenever Clare saw my strokes faltering, she would push at me even harder.

"Stop holding back," she urged me.

That was Clare just being Clare: religiously critical; harsh but dutiful, and sometimes, obviously showing off, perhaps sending an overt signal to all our seniors who, from all sides, seemed to be flashing occasional, scheming glances our direction.

When I dared to slacken under the swift, incessant force of her blows, she would grunt in frustration – a rebuke I have tried many times not to take personally, since I have never attained (or even dreamt of attaining) her level of skill. And when I started panting – the instance when Clare instinctively knew I was approaching the limits of my endurance – she would ruthlessly draw me out and end the sparring with a killer move.

Dancing around my weakening arm, then briefly lashed her sword in, just missing the bridge of my nose – deliberately. The automatic, reflex action of my dazed recoil signals that the fight is over. Her weathered, splinter-coated wooden blade spears out at me, in case I actually decide to resume the fight. She could have hit me if she wanted to, but she never does.

The fight over, Clare bends double, exhaling in one deep, heavy breath. I am compelled to follow: we stare each other, our arms hooked at our knees, as I feel the strain gently easing away from my muscles. Clare upturned eyes blink their approval.

"Enough for today!"

Dropping her sword at the command, she turned to me, nodding: her own gesture of wordless praise between the two of us. Brushing a cloud of hair from her face, she scrubbed the circles of perspiration with the sleeve of her training gear, while I collected our swords. In the background, that same voice from before gave a second order to assemble and we, the group of trainees, promptly clustered in formation.

"Still too slow." And from the clatter of our feet at attention, the leeching voice of Rubel, the overseer of our training programme, floated across to us.

Beneath his shades, I was certain he was examining us, his observations supplying the half-lopsided smile he stubbornly wore, Clare-like, on his face. When he seemed satisfied with his inspection, he strode away, signaling for us to dismiss.

"I almost forgot." We all paused as his leathery smooth voice carried over. "Congratulations to one particular trainee on her auspicious day."

He tipped his hat – surely, maliciously – to Clare, a motion of damnable intent hidden behind his faux praise.

No – we were so _close_ –

At once, Alina, the most senior of the trainees, snickered. In between the unmoved pack of trainees more concerned with returning back to their quarters than extending their well-wishes to Clare, Alina signaled to several seniors – or was I imagining things. I found myself absently scraping splinters of Clare's practice sword, the empty tips of my fingers bristling with a solemn discomfort.

No, assembly of seniors was real as a stray splinter stuck in between my fingernails: from my right-hand vision, Alina was already advancing, her group five-strong. She was fast.

"Clare, if you run now –"

Clare brushed my warning aside; with a clear scowl straining her face, she cautioned me not to speak anymore.

Once Rubel's presence left the room, it took just moments for Alina and her gang to surround us – Clare, you fool – and as they closed in, the remaining trainees, eager to watch but not wanting to participate, began to abandon the show.

None gave us a second look. With a knuckle-crackling mob of five of the most senior trainees (and Alina due to receive her rank in a few weeks' time), I did not feel surprised. Two girls moved over to flank Clare, who had her hands curled into awkward little fists.

"You're not going to run?" Serene asked.

"She does lives up to her reputation as a freak," Joan added.

"Enough talking," Alina's voice overruled her two closest comrades. "Let me deal with her."

She stepped forward, right in front of Clare; in the process, her hands slipped her short hair into a taut ponytail. She was serious; the last time I had seen Alina's hair so neatly bound, she had sparred with a ranked warrior in a bloody challenge – and won.

Alina jabbed her finger patiently on Clare's forehead, but she did not flinch, her head still tilted with a semi-hardened defiance. I could tell Clare was wringing every bit of self-control into submission in holding back to prevent an all-out fist fight.

"Not that running would help you anyway," Alina said.

"What – what should we do to her?" Joan asked, in mock uncertainty. Through her acting, I could make out the mischievous glint in her eyes.

"Strip her," someone requested.

"Shave off her hair."

"I want to see if she can actually last a minute with me in a fist fight," Serene said. I saw her flex her biceps, massaging them. She may have looked lean, but whenever she moved, it clear a lot of muscles were involved.

In the moment of repose, the antithesis of a traumatic event, I flung my eyes wildly for a chance to escape: Alina, squaring her shoulders; Joan, excited, eagerly waiting for orders in her leader's shadow, cast by the gradient of the afternoon sun; Serene, her arms crossed at her chest, displaying her arm strength, her face alight with ill intent; and the two seniors I had never bothered about till now, anticipating the show and the ways they could help. And waiting on the periphery of punishment just for being her friend, I found hands sweating, discoloured with blood from the coarse swords.

But Clare did not even blink at their threats – that self restraint of hers which I always admired was in full, fierce display.

"We're wasting time," said Alina. "Get the other one out of the way."

Someone's hands fastened themselves on my arm, forcefully, sneakily – curses – I exerted an opposing force – and the practice swords dropped out of my arms – and they folded backwards under strong hands – Serene's hands –

Clare rushed for my assailant: "You touch Elena –"

And Alina mashed her fist right into Clare's face.

"Clare!"

"Quiet!"

I nudged Serene hard with the sharp tip of my elbow, pleased to hear her grunt. For an instance my arms regained their freedom. I turned to deal my assailant a blow – but all I met was Joan's raised knee – and then I tumbled – only to be hoisted back to my feet by Serene again.

Pathetic.

And Serene confirmed it: "You weakling."

Alina caught hold of Clare by her hair, hauled her to her feet, then pressed one foot down on her right arm. She cupped her chin with two imposing fingers. She seemed particularly glad that her surprise punch had drawn blood.

"Listen," Alina spoke. "Not even freaks are exempted participation in the yearly tradition. You should be happy we've gone to such great lengths to celebrate this day with you."

Serene, holding my arms curled behind my spine, barked with laughter.

Alina leaned in closer: so close that Clare flinched this time.

"My friends want to strip, shave and pummel you," Alina said, her teeth protruding like a wild dog. "But I can do one better. I want to see if whatever's fused inside of you is really that strong. I want to see if you can regenerate a limb."

I struggled, hearing the threat – stop, stop – Clare fight her! – but Serene forced a hand down on my fingers, choking away my encouragement.

"The pills, Alina," someone said.

"Give them to me then!" she ordered. "Hold her!"

Joan stepped forward. Her elbow coming down on Clare's neck, Alina collected a fistful of dark brown pills, (I pulled against my assailant again) and with her free hand flung a fist into Clare's jaw from an angle –

"Clare!" I yelled.

"Shut it!"

"A present from our instructors," Alina hissed. She struck her arm into Clare's face again, then paraded the pills in her palm before her smarting eyes. "They were only too eager to provide us with gifts when they heard you would be the recipient."

Serene's knee –_ no – _jabbed into my spine, and I crumpled to the ground, straining to reach Clare.

Joan's horrible forced cheer came across to me: "You'll be the first in the academy to taste the pills the instructors always tells us about, Clare!"

"And this is in case you use your monster's side. Open up wide!" went Alina's sweet sing-song voice. And I watched as Clare thrashed – but Alina's probing, sinister hands forced the pills down Clare's mouth. "Swallow them!"

"Witch's blood!" I cursed. "You attack in numbers like rats –"

Then Alina took the liberty of keeping me quiet: all I felt were her knuckles sweeping across my forehead.

* * *

**3.**

"The loyal sidekick awakens!"

They had brought us out into the training grounds: the stench of untended grass, the unhindered air burned my eyes into recognition. In the nauseating grogginess of recovery I could see the dark, luminous smudges of trees in the open, and the scarring friction of uncut grass under my chin. As I attempted to prop myself up with my arms, a force – a foot – came down on my head, forcing me back into the mushy earth. Again my arms were wrestled, entwined behind me.

Then Serene's voice: "Relax. Watch the show."

Evening had diminished the effect of the streaming afternoon sun coming over from the walls, the glow of sunlight, instead, turning a concentrated shade of luminous orange. In a pale halo of light – like a sick performance – I saw Joan, holding Clare down with her entire bodyweight. Joan was giggling, her hands stroking Clare's shaking neck, every other moment peering low to taunt Clare, as if she was telling her a perverse joke.

I was glad Clare was struggling, and not giving her captor an easy time.

And Clare's face had not lost a single shade of her insolence.

From the shadows, emerged Alina – at once I focused on the instrument in her hands – a full, actual Claymore, its suggested sharpness flashing at the audience behind me, who gave their awed expressions of approval.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" she called out to her spectators. She made a sweeping motion with the Claymore. "A weapon not for weaklings." She directed the blade in my direction.

"Or freaks." And she turned it now towards Clare.

Alina posed again with the Claymore, swinging it deftly like it was a normal practice sword. With her free hand, she fished out one of Clare's arms out from her spread-eagled frame, and stretched out on the grass.

_All the host of heaven!_

And my mouth moved in automatic protest: "Alina! You're not going to DO THAT! You're not –"

The force on the back of my head pressed my open tongue into a mouthful of grass.

"Good! Keep that one shut!" went someone.

Alina grinned. She held up the Claymore, edging it gingerly over Clare's restrained head, as if she was about to consecrate her with that hideous weapon.

"Clare, trainee, loser and freak of the academy," Alina declared, her proud voice inflated with its fake authority. "I hereby – hereby – I hereby pronounce you my pathetic junior, and deem it meet to exercise a senior's tradition on you today!"

"Hear! Hear!" went Serene.

Watching the wide arc of Alina's Claymore, she arched it back, into the air, and then – its sharp tip pointed down – forced it onto Clare's arm –

I squashed my eyes shut – Clare! –

I've never heard her scream like that before.

Clare! Fight it!

When I next saw Clare, her face was crumpled in pain, her teeth showing, her eyes stiffly wide open, her neck straight and baring all its muscles – and she let out another yell as Alina pulled the Claymore loose, flinging earth and blood and chunks of meat into the air. Right beside her face, Joan grinned sheepishly, her grotesque playacting in full swing as she gave Clare a peck on the cheek.

"She has yet to faint," Alina commented. "Impressive for a girl now with three fingers left."

"Maybe she will when she has none on that hand?" ventured Joan, in her mocking, childish gait.

"And a proposition by another senior."

And Alina brought the blade down again.

I blinked into the grass, letting the blades and the spikes of withered stalks sear my eyes. I fought back the wet, smothering sensation threatening to swath my eyes – there were better things to do –

Hang on Clare!

When Clare had ceased her screaming, the training grounds turned absolutely still. My ears could pick up a dull, anguished moaning.

Forgive me Clare! Forgive me forgive me forgive me

"Let that weakling try."

The force on the back of my head dissipated, followed by the grip on my overstretched arms. I blinked again – wait – but I was now on my feet – Serene was dragging me with her – and she fastened a grip, spider-like, on the back of my head as she brought me before Alina.

"Crush her head if she tries anything funny, Serene."

Alina was smiling – a Rubel-intense kind of smile. Her hand moved to my face – I cringed – and she pat my cheek like she would a captured, cornered animal.

"Curse you," I mouthed.

"No you won't." She was forcing herself to smile, and any moment I was expecting her to swing the blade at me. But she did not assault me.

"Take the sword."

She forced the blade into my hand. With her hand guiding, she wrapped her palm around the hilt: she was controlling me! She was using me! She was –

"Slice off that arm, Elena."

At my feet lay shredded bits of dull pinkish strips – a coat of sparkling crimson so rich I imagined the grass itself had reddened into a puddle – and a face: Clare's grim, disbelieving, anxious face.

"Leave her out of this!" She managed to say, before Joan thrust a fist into her right cheek.

Clare, you idiot – all you could think about was your own safety!

"Come on, Elena. It's your turn to show Clare your appreciation!" went Joan, her sickening full-face smile making me tremble.

"You would not disobey your seniors, would you," accompanied Serene's heavy, intimate voice.

"Slice her arm off," Alina repeated. "Or I'll be compelled to take yours."

My hand was moving on its own accord, the pull of a greater strength leading it as if it were held by many strings. And Clare's bloody stump of her hand, twitching, moving like a worm in the grass –

"Do it!"

"DO IT NOW!"

Then the Claymore, with my arm buckling under its weight, started to fall. I heard Alina screech, right into my ear – "do it now!" – but the blade swung too far out of my control. I felt the pull of Alina's hand-strength coming in to correct me. Yet it grazed across the grass at Clare's head, but I twisted my wrist – I pulled it high – right at the last moment – and then, and then –

And then Joan was clutching the right side of her face like it had been burned.

Freed, Clare rushed at me – Clare! – and my vision of her reverberated, swelled, as a headache flooded into the back of my head.

"You coward!" Clare shouted. "Face me like a warrior!"

Something hit my legs; they burned, and I folded into the grass, the green blades filling my senses again. Legs, like trees, swarmed around. Many people were crying out, in anger, in alarm. But Clare's voice stood out the most clear of all:

"Elena, run!"

* * *

**4.**

The forced, emotional release of yoki helped me to recover my senses. At once, I could feel my heartbeat flare. But I had not crossed my limits; I moved my palms together, relived no claws or scales were evident.

Instead, Clare was just trying to use her yoki, a powerful amount, to heal her damaged hand.

I pulled myself into a sitting position. The training grounds were empty, quiet, and dark with the heaviness and subtle cricket echo-call of the late evening. Fragments of light from adjacent windows, mingled with faint moonlight allowed me to pick out the Claymore – a sore silver marker in the open field – sunk into the ground like a memorial to mark where I knew were deep streaks of red in the grass.

Clare's flow of undiluted, restrained yoki ended, and she turned to me. Through the darkness, I could see her bleeding, swollen right eye and her training attire ripped across the abdomen. The yoki suppressants had worked: her right hand was still a fingerless mould of blackened flesh. In comparison, beyond dirt on my attire and an exploding, sore head, I was unscathed.

Clare must have seen it too. Her face tossed into shadow as she turned to face me, she gave me a small, approving smile.

"What did they do?" I could only remember Alina, Joan's marred face, and the imagined crushing blow of Serene's executing hand.

"They knocked you out, so I decided to get revenge for you."

"You fool! You should've just ran."

"And thanks for passing out when I needed you most. The two of us could've taken the five of them easily."

I wanted to smile, but I remained overwhelmed by her defiance.

"Your fingers?" I asked.

She held up her right hand; all I could see was dark stubs of flesh and dried blood. But her plain, half-smiling face told me she was in no pain.

I decided not to ask where Alina or the others were, or whether Clare had fought them off single-handed with nothing more than an eye injury. That would be a story for tomorrow. Evidence of some struggle – shredded fabric and what appeared to be a single tooth just beside me – littered the grounds. But the pain in my head continued to exert its influence; I did not want to think about anything else.

I clutched absently into the air, only to have Clare assist me in gently laying my head on the grass. From the dark shadows of the training ground, my vision swung upwards into survey the night sky, burdened from end to end with glistening stars.

Lying there, free from injury, pain confined to my head, I felt compelled to speak:

"I'm sorry, Clare."

"What for?"

"That your day turned out like this."

Clare's face – bloodied, bruised, wearing a thinly-concealed grin – swam over mine, a surreal foreground the stars beyond.

"Elena, I knew my family, so I've never known when I was born."

I saw Clare smile intensify: she must have seen the surprise on my face.

"I don't even know how old I am."

She disappeared from my sight. Then a soft noise of something falling to the grass. Acting on instinct, I found myself alert, nervous and my head flipped in the direction of the noise – only to see Clare resting down on the grass beside me, facing the other direction, our faces sudden neighbours.

I observed her as she glanced silently over the training grounds, all the while framing her actions against my disbelief.

She could have just said something – but she stayed silent.

Clare, you _fool_.

Her face turned to face the sky. A lock of her hair fell onto my cheek – we were _that_ close – and stretched out her wounded hand to the cloudless sky above like a salute. The mute, unresponsive clutter of stars and clouds did not give any acknowledgment. It was Clare and me, and this open swell of dark greenery, and this crumbling academy, in the urban soul of Staff. It felt as if there was nobody else left the world but two battered trainees callously admiring the heavens.

I could hear her breathing, the faint unnerving stench of dried blood and her soft, thoughtful whisper as she said to no one in particular:

"But that was a good fight."

I continued to watch Clare, but eventually followed her aimless stare into skywards, her right arm crowned with blood directing my eyes at too many stars, the warmth from her shoulders seeping into mine where our bodies made fleeting contact.

Still, this day is yours, Clare –

For now, at least, I had no intention of moving.

* * *

_Edit: This Claymore story helped me win a title at the OneManga forums in July 2008. I modeled it after some of my experiences on what other people like to surprise you with on your birthday._


	3. Warmth

**Warmth**

"_So don't let the world bring you down.  
Not everyone here is that f--ed up and cold.  
Remember why you came and while you're alive,  
experience the warmth before you grow old…"_

- _The Warmth_, Incubus (From Make Yourself, 1999)

* * *

**1.**

He dons his coat, then shuffles his shoulders to fit into the tightness of the fur-lined inside. He has become too accustomed to snowstorms in middle of March after centuries of hiding in the north.

But now he reminds himself he is now a southerner. A vagrant, a dirty winter rat no more, with more than just frost and ice for a horizon. There is no more need for him to flex his powerful sinews to emphasise his desire for a greater portion or for the aimless sake of territory, he convinces himself. There is no need for dirty tactics either. There is no need for exercising control over bloodthirsty, awakened hounds which are such a pain to discipline. And, most of all (as he truly believes) there is no need for war. He waits at his doorpost and honestly – echoes – with – all his heart – that it is time to beat his sword into a sickle.

Nonetheless, it is too early in all of this to get philosophical: he shrugs his bare shoulders loose from his overcoat as he steps outside. The sun spills over them, casting his shadow in sharp, steep relief as it billows from behind. He knows the warmth is prickling him, but he cannot really feel it, being who he is.

So he sighs. And treading into the fields, his barebacked figure glossy in the high noon, he goes in search for a stream to wash the blood from his hands.

* * *

**2.**

He has always been able to picture himself committing the sins he has for so long been in denial over. Only today, they seem more poignant. More vivid and actively real. As he scrubs the crimson wisps of skin from underneath his fingernails and from between his thighs, he sees some of them, occupying the space in between land and blue, blue sky:

He waits at the empty, ravished part of town. His face, with all its genetically-altered imperfections, he stows away in the crumbling stem of half-light growing from nearby houses. The stench, the impulse brooding under his skin, compels him to leave the safety of solitude and seek out human company. He knows he must act like a human, or else he will attract too much attention.

Careful to straighten his back and smile, he strolls into a tavern – a tavern which he thinks looks like any other from any town in the south (dilapidated, sleazy, dark, smelly etc etc.) – and plants himself at a vacant table. At the sight of humans he requests himself to suppress his other, distressing urges. Instead, he tries to make himself believe he will be content with the fire-coaxed setting of the tavern – and a mouthful of the blandest alcohol he has ever laid his lips upon.

No one has noticed anything untoward, but he has been into places like this many times over. So he recognizes the locals' eyes on him and their tongues unfurling in suspicion of his stranger-ness. But he, a warrior, will not be cowered: as he sips from the grail, he removes his blade, and lifts it in full view of the occupants and adjusts it, as he would an innocent table setting.

There is an immediate hush, a strangling of static noise – only for it to resume in the usual tavern chatter moments after. His grin he conceals with another swig; he knows a slight display of power will deter drunken aggression from bored townspeople against outsiders. But, tonight, as his longings tell him, he is not content just to leave this town to its own devices.

His eyes therefore inevitably wander to a secluded corner of the tavern – its feature attraction, not meant to be acknowledged by those morally upright enough to possess the powers of acknowledgement. He, as he understands, cannot describe himself as a moral person. Do the Awakened have morals? Do they observe ethics? He watches the shadowed movements of the bright-skinned women who linger on customers and immediately reaches his own conclusion:

They do not.

He infers the town has fallen on hard times (he recalls overgrown fields barren without productive crop on his way to the town) and the only business its inhabitants have to offer is the trade of drink and flesh. A girl with a black-eye tries to cajole a drunk customer; another, he feels, has her dress low enough to charge his already blood-burning hunger for a different kind of flesh than he usually partakes of.

Finally he decides he is done with just watching. Seizing his sword, he crosses the tavern in several broad strides, and he goes up to the nearest of them. He brushes he hand against her cheek, the touch of human skin static, charged, pulsing; he feels the raw blood slipping through his fingers and into his palette. His body responds: a pinch in a region below his torso, a reckless escalation of appetite.

He asks her how much.

And he fastens his hand on the back of her neck as she leads him to the inn which would be somewhere beyond. The brooding pulsating desire to satiate his carnal need for entrails catches him at that exact moment; but he obscures it with the thought of this venture. Need, he thinks, must sometimes give way to periods of indulgence.

* * *

**3.**

Memory jolts him. The dissolution of red and pale water reminds him of something else also:

A road, a trade route; he is walking triumphantly out of a town. He cannot remember where exactly, but he knows, as always, he is in the south. He sees the sun forcing its red smear over the hills which dwarf the road, and he looks from the horizon to find himself apparently cornered by four warriors.

They are all women. Fair ladies would be a better definition. He knows he is actually surprised that his former employers have replaced him with an army of the yoma-contaminated who look no older than farm girls. He eyes their armour. Dressed to kill has taken on a new meaning for him.

They block the road: two behind and two from his front. There are no other travellers on this deserted stretch. He understands this ambush is deliberate, well-planned and meant to keep his slaying as quiet as his former employers think they can calculate it to be. But the girls interest him; they also make him conscious he is underdressed, his shirt torn and a greater part of his torso showing. Still he decides, callously, to wait for them to make the first move.

One of the warriors detaches herself from formation. She is blonde, lean, childishly petite (if he thinks such a phrase exists) with one long braid of hair looped like a noose around falling from the back of her head. The armour has, on the contrary, softened her, for behind her splaulders and braces of iron, he notices the bare flush of skin at her neck, the slender strips of muscle crisscrossing her triceps, the dimpled stub of flesh showing from the base of her throat.

"Awakened One Isley," she addresses him. "We come on the orders of the Organization to –"

Take me down, he knows.

"For your crimes as an Awakened Being against humans. We recommend you submit quietly. Or else we will resort to force."

He laughs, throwing at her his biggest smile. If bedding harlots in backwater towns is an offence against humanity, he would gladly accept his guilt, he ventures.

"We don't accommodate your excuses," the warrior replies. At her order, all four draw their Claymores. At the sight of the blades, he feels the twitch of nostalgia: he has not touched a Claymore since his disastrous defeat and conversion. Surely as a creature born-again he does not need steel or iron to kill, he reasons, but the pang of memory stings him, ever so slightly.

"Draw your weapon, yoma," she orders him.

He honestly answers he does not possess one.

"Then we'll finish this quick and clean," she nods at him. Her eyes betray – what – relief? "Thank you for your cooperation –"

He holds up his hand. Not so fast, no so fast. He gestures at the one who has been giving the commands thus far. He inquires her name.

Her eyes demean him, her reaction that of inconvenienced annoyance: "A creature facing death does not need to know his slayer's name."

He smiles once more, then comes up with a proposition too enticing for her to refuse: if you lose, he requests, will you tell me your name?

All the four warriors laugh; at the same time they approach him with blades drawn in a stance he cannot identify. The blonde, lean, childishly petite one smirks at him.

"Over my dead, awakening body," she swears. "I make no promises with vulgar male yoma."

He sincerely wishes that it should not have come to this. But as the warriors all close in around him, instinct readies a steady flow of unhealthy energy flowing from his inside. The excitement warms him. And he issues a final warning to the warrior he has been conversing with:

The next time you answer another of my requests, all your friends will be dead. And I will have you answer me in the affirmative.

* * *

**4.**

He recalls Rigardo's crude regimental slang about women – a maxim too frequently uttered during their free roaming days at the pinnacle of the Organization's elite: in the dark, all women look the same.

So when the tavern-girl leads him up into the room, he insists he light the single taper sitting forlorn beside the grimy bed. At the sight of light (or is it just his presence?) he senses insects and vermin creep out of the room. Like many others he has been into, it is of staple height, width and quality: it is less a room, than it is a suitable station for quick satisfaction.

The tavern-girl is too young. Too quiet. Too mechanical. She knows the routine: she leads him to the bed, ensures he is comfortable, and stands to undress. In one deft pluck of her fingers, he sees her erase all fabric from her skin, and he takes in a view of her shadowed skin, the graffiti of scratch marks mapping her torso from other customers, her bones showing like scales along the entire curve of her figure. She throws her hair back; presumably, he thinks she wants him to see her face.

Her first kiss, he assesses, is equivalent to sucking a carcass. Her second is, taking into account her atrocious acting, even worse. Fearing he will get no amusement tonight, he seizers her by her shoulders, gently lifts her up and assembles her on the moth-holed bed. He waits, and kisses her hand, putting on his most gentle, relaxed touch. Women, regardless of profession, are to be treated with the utmost modesty and respect, he believes.

She startles, but he places a second kiss on her hand, making him seem as if he is waiting for her permission to continue. He asks her name.

"Elsa." Her single breath is hurried, obviously unsure, afraid.

He tells her to drop the pretense. He repeats the first question and, as encouragement, brushes the matted locks of her out of her eyes so she can see him better in the miserable light.

"Alia, daughter of Talib of Aluccur."

One sentence is all it takes for him to know many things: she is a Southerner, she is several days' journey from her hometown and, most of all, she has a beautiful name. Alia. _Ginger_.

He proceeds, shakily, to ask of her family.

"The yoma killed them."

And here is the stringent, absolute irony about reality, he tells himself, and like many times before he knows even before he makes love to this girl, he is guilty of both the sins of commission and omission. As a human he cannot save; as a monster he cannot be redeemed. He stares into the thin, skeletal face and can only quietly stroke her forehead, as if he is too afraid to commit himself to do anything more.

"You are different."

He wants to laugh, but now is not the appropriate time for epiphanies. Instead, he sees this time the girl initiates: there is the mandatory uncovering of his upper body, and the arduous stripping of his pants. She struggles to remove them, and while waiting he pulls her to him, breathing deeply into her foul, unwashed dirty red hair.

She hesitates, her hands fastening onto his shoulders, and once again he decides to take control: he raises her carefully, and rotates her under him. He releases a miniscule burst of his intense, foreign energy. And he sees her eyes widen. He shifts his weight, and feeling comfortable he fixes his stare, right into her blank dim eyes, until the sweat that lubricates their moving bodies paints her face the luminous colour of dazzling moonlight –

Until she hangs onto him as if he is the only buoy on the dark, murky expanse of their uncovered bed.

* * *

**5.**

He does not need to awaken. He does not even need to transform his famous longbow left arm.

As all four female warriors come in at him, he swiftly moves out from the reach of their swords – _one-two-three-four _– slipping past their bundling, clumsy strikes. He wants to mock them for their careless swordplay and tactics, but he thinks insults would further distract them from performing at their best – a performance he, Isley, the greatest swordsman the Organization ever had, is sincerely interested to see.

One swings her Claymore right at his face. But he catches the cumbersome blade with his right hand. Its edge stings his fingers. He feels the prickly sensation of a wound. And with his free hand he hits her chin with a lateral uppercut so strong her neck snaps backwards.

The grip on the Claymore goes limp.

Now he has a blade; falling into stance he sees the other three approach, carefully now, their eyes flashing between the blood-tinted Claymore in his hand and their injured comrade. He dons another all-knowing smile, drops the sword and before it even hits the ground, the other three seize the opening to cut him down.

_One-two-three_. He dodges all their blows. One injects yoki into her moves. He spins away from her furious attempt to sever his head. In mid-air, he pummels a fist into her stomach. A muscle gives way. He forces his hand right through her torso until he feels drenched in a watery, wet blood-shower.

Warmth enfolds his hand. But he tosses the body aside, and asks whether they still want to continue.

"You filthy monster!"

As a third rushes at him, covered by the final warrior immediately behind, he decides to finish them as painlessly as possible. He speeds up and the warriors overreach with their swords. _One-two_. He aims for the back of their heads, sweeps the final two warriors off their feetand lunges at them as they fall.

He puts enough yoki in his fingers to make them stiffen and strain. Like a pitchfork he punches them down, elongated, into the warriors' faces. _Four-three-two-one_. The last warrior struggles to stand, but he has brought his hand down, and the pleading grip on his arm, like that of a persistent lover, diminishes.

He picks up a Claymore. Strolling over to where the victim of his uppercut is trying to stand, he kicks her in the ribs, smashes his heel into her neck and then rolls her over so she is facing him. He settles his right foot over her throat. When she chokes, he applies weight.

You did not have to be belligerent, he tells her. You could have just told me your stupid name.

He feels disgusted that he needs to oblige his own promise. The act of torturing a lady – what more a warrior of his former allegiance – really goes against all his own principles.

He tells her not to scream. To be safe he stuffs his foot into her mouth. And, swinging the Claymore, he shears her of her arms and legs at the bone; he clips the limbs with the gentility of a butcher, her armour splitting into pieces where the force of his cleaving skill overwhelms it. He feels her teeth clamp into his toes. When he finally removes them, she has run out of breath. She is crying; veins, spidery and hideous, are starting to overtake her face.

He sits, straddling her chest. Stroking her tears away and asks for what is the last time:

"Will you tell me your name now?"

Her canine teeth turn into razor sharp jaws. But she is human enough to cry out with a monstrous, man-voice her name.

Elsa.

But it is too late. He has already moved with the sword. With one stroke he allows her to pass on honourably as a human.

He stands there. He wants to question the headless corpse. Elsa? Elsa? Elsa? Alia? What? How? Who? Where?

He knows he has been provoked, ruthlessly even. But he still buries all of them by the wayside. The dead should be respected, the correct rites must be observed for the fallen. He even arranges their Claymores in a neat, artistic single file.

* * *

**6.**

It is morning now. Sunlight stumbles in haphazardly from the creaking window where he, cross-armed, his bare skin alight with the morning, watches the street below. He sees the multitudes of townspeople, going about their sorry, sordid business under the weight of his gaze. The drapes stir; he senses movement on the bed behind him. He realizes he is blocking the breeze.

He adjusts his jaw, finds the cracked surface skin of his lips, moistened by her numerous kisses the night before. His fingers betray the faint discolouration of blood, but the girl behind him continues to swim under the covers of bed, apparently undaunted and awake.

He sighs. Here comes the hard part.

He stands such that he is completely obstructs the light, causing the room to fall into claustrophobic gloom once more. The taper has long burned out, a greasy tooth of wax and dirt threatening to dislocate from its perch by the wall. Under the dagger of the burnt out candle, the girl breaks surface from beneath the swirling sea of unraveled clothes and bedspreads. She looks at him. He thinks she gazes as a fish would look at an angler, having been dragged up from the depths to face the unearthly.

"You are different," she repeats. "You are not human."

He does not want to dwell on that revelation. He points to his armour and his sword.

Take them, he tells her, and buy yourself out of this brothel and find a husband, because I have no other money to pay you.

She continues to stare. Perhaps she does not know even how to say thanks. But he is getting uncomfortable, and he does not want to stay, fearing he might find an appetite that would cause him to commit a greater atrocity than fornication. He fishes his coat from the bed. He is heading for the door and then – "no" – her hand latches onto his arm, like a desperate final lifeline.

"No. Stay with me."

He turns his head away. In his previous life, he and Rigardo have had many philosophical takes on this moment. Can a Claymore warrior know true love? Can a woman fall in love with the yoma-touched? Will a strumpet be anything more than a whore? But now, here in this crummy, seedy inn in the middle of nowhere, he stares back, tempted sorely by the morally illogical and the emotional pull that arm, touch and invitation itself exert. She pours kisses on his arm; she laps at his girly thin fingers as if they are a delicacy; she squirms close to that single arm he has yet to retract, nuzzling in her bosom like a second heart. He cannot look: should he have stared into that face, elf-like in its scrawny beauty, with its eyes finally open – he would have succumbed to the obvious choice.

How he wishes he would have been free to make that choice!

Instead he tears her arm away from him and puts on his tattered coat. He hears her cries to stop but he is already out the door and down the stairs. Only when he is clear of the glares of the innkeeper and his regular drunk customers does he curse, swear and blaspheme the heavens for his existence.

Out of pretense he walks warily into the ruined fields where, surrounded by rotting wheat, he tries to cry. He has been through this many times before – real warriors do not cry, says his old friend Rigardo – but, he reasons, he is not a man. And he waters the drought-stricken field with tears as elusive as precious stones.

Later, he tries to contain himself when the four warriors mock him, but he overwhelms them. As he beheads the leader, he finds her name too familiar for chance to manipulate.

* * *

**7.**

So, standing in the southern field dissolving the bloodstains in the running water, Isley stares at the blank horizon made blurry by the noontide heat. He scrubs at the blots on sides of his pants, scrapes the toughest spots from the gloss of his fingernails and then, in a moment of thoughtlessness, dunks his head underwater and arises, as if he has been cleansed by the flow of cool, pure artesian spring water.

When he parts his dripping tresses, his vision opens like the curtains of an ethereal window, taking in the eternal stretch of fields and the miracle of their harvest.

But he fails to see that his cleansing stream has turned into a fountain of crimson.

He takes the trail back to the place where he had last left his sane self. As he enters the doors he truly wonders if he should have forsaken the idea of women, dropped the thought that a creature – a truly hideous and devastating one – like himself could ever be satisfied with anything other than the devouring flavour of human entrails.

Yet on the bed, in a flower of bloodstains, she looks at him meekly, and he remembers that they are not finished for today. Her body bears the savage marks of his lovemaking: marks, which will heal, and are – honestly speaking – a trifle cost to pay considering she has been unfaithful many times over. At the end of their bargain, is it not just an endless battle (life is a battle anyway) for who finds the most satisfaction out of this game?

She crawls to the light, to him. Isley settles her down: a frail figure; he clasps the thinness of her shoulders with one palm, and curls the rest of his frame around her. His dripping wet body, still drenched, feels the warmth of their proximity shoot through him, from the pits of his shoulders to the slick stream of his chest.

But the first word she utters is "Raki?"

Likewise he thinks of Alia, and then Elsa, and then – no more faces. There are too many. Too many to even list by name. He is an honourable man, he believes, who will act faithful even though she chooses not to. Neither does he wish to think how a human can conquer blinded the steep hillside of a misguided _agape_ love, while he an immortal in all his powers, cannot even mount the first slope. Even after centuries of mountaineering.

What Raki does not know cannot hurt him, he reasons. Then bites down hard over her mouth to smother the vile pronunciation of that name.

* * *

_Thanks to Yosei & Hell for comments that helped to shape this fic. This is one of the rare few times I've tried writing using present-tense.  
_

_Edited: 02.10.2008.  
_


	4. Dogfighting

**Dogfighting**

**1.**  
The first time I bested A – in a real swordfight, I was already a single digit.

Like before, the fight began over some petty concern, and escalated into full-scale disagreement. She shouted at me this time – twice. When her taunts come, her face gives in to distortion; all evidence indicated she was not going to let the misunderstanding settle itself without a swordfight. A –, in her typical authoritarian, brash style, choose not to wait for an official engagement of arms: her sword was already drawn, poised, before I had the opportunity to call terms.

Her strikes came in repetitions, commanding attention from her trademark snarl of determination. Her right arm, twisted many times in battles before to produce that deadliest of weaponry, had threatened to engross itself in its revolution already at the onset. Had she the means and opportunity to do so, needless to say I would not be telling this story. But even the best and brightest make mistakes: gross errors which cannot be forgiven, pardoned or accepted. Not that she did hesitate as you might speculate. No, A – is too professional for that. But when the moment of departure from that professionalism arose, I took it gladly.

The fight took a lot out of both of us. When it was over, I knelt over the deep green grass (even the softest surface hurt, because her final strike had took out my knees). Fascinated by my right arm, refusing to cease shivering after performing the last move, pieces of limbs, flesh, muscle and cartilage lay scattered around me like confetti.

* * *

**2.**  
We go back a long time, all the way back to our days in the academy. Then, A – had shorter hair – a crop of sandy curls parted down the middle. Her fringe was unnecessarily messy (and she will always accuse me of copying that style), framing a face with unnaturally sharp ears, a slender slice of nose and drawling eyes. She looked svelte with her arrnour on, but in our sparring sessions, her movements told me a lot of muscles were involved. She uttered a snarl whenever she was frustrated, and her face turned angular, her nose the perfect right angle.

In other words, she was the academy bully, the least liked warrior among the trainees.

Least liked does not entail despised, though. A – might have been the least liked, but the instructors, Rubel, and the other black-dressed men were the most hated. Still, she had accrued a kind of reputation for herself. She was the only warrior in the academy to have developed a technique for herself: a twisted arm move which could drill a fist sized wound in flesh. But mostly her reputation came from an unarmed sparring episode with one of seniors (this lanky warrior named Galatea). She broke her nose; and for the first time I can remember, we the recruits had to intervene to prevent a senior from losing all her teeth.

"Mongrel." That was A – 's favourite cuss word. Unconfirmed sources say she was the eighth daughter of a kennel master. And she said "mongrel" to everyone. Including the senior called Galatea, whom she had beaten into a position which she deemed "worthier of bitch than claymore."

But to me she always added an adjective, and sometimes several verbs. She would find an excuse to have her leg stepped upon by my leg, or have her path intersected by my path, or her favourite tree of all the 50 in our training ground occupied by my simply being present, all just to tell me:

"Scrawny mongrel, you. Really are a dog with your loyalty, you."

Sometimes she would add an epithet:

"And dogs are meant to be kicked."

At our first ever fight, she claimed I had stolen her favourite practice sword. Her face was already beginning to convert into its angular, point-of-no-return quality by the time I had realised what a mess I allowed myself into. Barring the other trainees gathered out of interest into who A – was going to wallop next, she openly challenged me to a duel.

"It's occurred to me I haven't tamed you yet, mongrel," she insisted.

Pleading for out was not an option. Especially not with your fellow peers watching and instructors silently marking what could turn out to be a good show. No one in the academy refused a fight and graduated with a rank (no one except Clare, but she was different). I was not foolish enough to agree, but I lacked the courage to refuse. So I gave in to my fears: I pointed the blade at her in defiance.

She was only too glad to respond. The rumours were that her strikes were dirty and dishonourable; she did not adhere to the rule to keep to the areas easy to heal. To my detriment, she confirmed these doubtful sources: the first swipe could have taken my fingers, the second was clearly aimed at my eyes, and the third – the third – cleaved a nice cut through my thigh.

The whole world seemed to congregate at that malevolent sword. Every move it made seemed to be larger, greater than even the prickling, nagging sense coming from the initial injury. I tried to concentrate, succeeding in throwing some well-aimed and useless strikes at her blade. Straightening the claymore, it moved to my reckless impulses and untrained hand, clumsy and confidently insecure.

Immediately, at one instant moment, her sword seemed to magically evade my focus, and fly to me. In that one short move, she felled my armed hand.

In total, it took a conclusive ten minutes. She defeated all resistance in just her second attack. The sight of blood, and then my wriggling five fingers, blithely relinquishing their lifeless grip on the blade, was an epiphany, a heaven-sent image equivalent to a divine uppercut. It was articulated, verbally, from A – 's mouth later:

"Weak, weak, _weak_. You're one weak bitch, aren't you Jean?"

Replying the affirmative did not serve any purpose. But then A – had already begun to wind her arm. It would've made a good opening, had not a swift kick to the shin sent me stumbling. And as I listened to the creaking of her spinning arm, my detached hand beckoned like warning to run. Wrestling my way free, I vainly sought to prevent her arm from executing its rotation. As a reward, A –'s elbow came careening into my limited line of sight.

When she released her strung arm the blade came at me so fast there was nothing I could do but throw my arms to protect my face. The blade shred through flesh, then muscle and then – the steel sucked the coldness from my exposed bone at my left arm, paused. A – shrieked with laughter and when I came to she danced towards me and, before I could react, swept her sword up to me, a conscious slap to my face by the hilt of her sword.

"Three revolutions!" she screamed in what looked like maniac joy. "Just three!"

"Weak Jean, you're not even worth five. You're even worth half of my full effort."

Her hand rested on my head as I strained to stand, and my eyes blinked only to see the ground at close-up again. Some of the other trainees were starting to walk away. And A – with them. Her disappearing figure turned hazy with warmth. And a hot, unwanted tear joined the sweat on my face and burned its way to the ground, pooling where my chin rested in its humiliating crater.

* * *

**3.**  
So it felt good to lose contact with her when she left the academy as an official monster-killer. Not long after I was deployed too. There were many more fights, with many other girls, before the instructors found it fit to hand me a number. Certainly, I lost some, but some the teammates assigned to me later added that some mad, unnatural obsession with beating away dissent had somehow flourished in me. Not to mention, they noted with a kind of suspicious disdain I was also twisting my arm into a taut tricep-twist. They warned me not to use it as my finishing move, fearing it would spark reprisals from A – , who at my graduation was already drilling, bullying and dogfighting her way to single-digit status.

_Screw her_, I told them. But, literally speaking, the move was not yet confident enough to show itself completely.

* * *

**4.**  
The first time I actually bested A – in a real swordfight, I was already a single-digit.

For some deeply-mistrustful reason, every time this story is told, listeners get the impression of a colossal confrontation at a deserted field between two warriors eager to settle old schoolyard disputes with swords instead of fists.

Not quite. The meeting was not determined by the great hand of coincidence, and neither did we arrange it (though she probably would relish any excuse for confrontation). A message was sent out, ordering us to hunt A – down and exterminate her; in the Organization's style, they believed I – Jean of the twisted arm, whose only obstacle in the academy was a training ground bully – would jump at the opportunity to even the score.

As much as they do not deserve such credit, they were not wholly wrong.

I ambushed her, like a common criminal, outside a town. Behind her, impatient flames were licking the buildings clean.

Her cheeks were flushed with yoki. The Organization had not given the reason for why we needed to dispatch her, but the signs were too evident to be negate. With a thrill, she shouted my name; her voice had lost its husky, teasing melody, degrading into a hoarse, throaty baritone. And her blade was so coated in crimson it appeared to be bleeding.

"Jean, Jean, Jean," she sang. "The dog has returned to its master!"

A single-digit warrior has no excuse to play into the hands of such cheap insults. But once my claymore was drawn, I began circling her, waiting for a chance to end it quickly and cleanly. But A – let loose a burst of yoki, smiling like a grotesque model of Rubel. Blood continued to drain from her blade.

A restless trail harking back to the ruined, flame-tossed township behind.

_You're a murderer_, I accused. Drop your sword and receive your due penance.

"Dogs don't bite their masters," she said. "Dogs sit!"

Her downward thrust I met with an oblique upward strike. But with each moment, the force of her assault intensified, and not anticipating the explosion of yoki, my knees buckled under me. She forced her into kneeling position.

"That's a good bitch! Sit sit sit!"

Automatically, yoki pumped one extra ounce of brute strength to my arms, and I pushed my way to standing position. A –'s face was livid; her tongue, like a worm, was thrashing in her blood-gargled mouth.

"Sit! Sit! If you don't sit I will be very angry, you crazy dog you!"

_Speak for yourself_.

"What? What?"

Sweat from the enormous effort of defence was soiling my fringe, leaking in to mix with my speech-laden saliva.

"Disobedient dogs deserve to be cast into the fire!"

Her face had now turned itself inside out. There was no longer the prominent nose, razor-thin features so distinctively A –. Instead, the yoki ran amok her human shell, the mere capsule where the monster within her took its placid form. The nails at her fingertips had begun to narrow, then sharpen; her eyes, once malicious as a summer sunlight, were glowing like hot coals; her biceps bubbled by the minute. And by the time I pushed her bulky frame away, her face had become feral: shining teeth perched atop a snout, rabid, carnal.

Her voice was different. She spoke with her throat, an unfriendly growl: "Only dogs like you mimic their masters' moves."

The critical recognition of her counter-accusation came with a strike targeted for my forehead. The blow swerved across my blade so fast and so quick it blinded, and the next image I registered was a curtain of blood veiling my eyes. In between those big obstructing streams of blood – came the perilous sound and sight of her turning her right arm in continuous revolutions –

Panic drove my arm into its preparatory twisting: 1, 2, 3 –

"No more chances, you! Fifteen revolutions will finish you, dog!"

_Not yet. _And betraying the sight of what must have looked to be a deep stripe on my forehead, I began to force the process – 6, 7, 8 – hoping against hope my answer would have the advantage of spontaneity and power over hers. In those crucial seconds, muscle began to blend into muscle, bone flexed into bone; the crunch of already damaged cartilage and joints, as they kneaded themselves into a singular funnel of elastic muscular power – under the influence of blood-drenched yoki the pain fuelled a persistent turn, turn, turning of this weapon . 13, 14, 15 –

At 15, she came at me.

"Copycat you!"

The tornado of her arm was aimed at my face. With my other hand holding my twisted arm in place, deflecting the attack did not appear possible. So I resorted to something Clare would surely disapprove of: I pouched at A – with what would probably have appeared to be a lame attempt to allow my knee to take all the damage.

And it worked. A –'s drilling, spinning sword took out a chunk of knee, bone and tendon before I crashed into her – 19, 20, 21 – She reeked of yoki at close-range, and her loosely swirling arm spun away into empty air.

"You – you – you!"

– 23.

It's already been emphasized earlier that even the best are prone to mistakes. And in this do-or-die fight, the error had, for the first time, shifted to A –'s record: she had come at me with 15 revolutions of her favourite move. Whether she could have done more is now mere speculation, but considering her superiority and creativity in inventing the technique – which turned me, unofficially, into a thief – there was not any doubt she could have outstripped even 23 painful, demanding turns. Why she stuck to 15 is a question reserved for earnest prayer and soul-searching, like a deadly secret to be revealed only on my deathbed, when I'm hopefully succumbing to a rightful, mortal wound through my torso.

And not from disgraceful split kneecaps during this fight.

What remained to be done was simple. A – snarled; I pulled every last drop of control over my yoki into my taut, sword-holding arm. I plunged it right into her chest, and then said for the first time (of what would be many more): _maximum number of revolutions reached. _Then I let go.

She reminded me of those ridiculous toys we used to play in our far, innocent childhood: a spinning top. With my arm as pivot, I watched A –'s entire body unravel into streams of beautiful ribbons, as if I was opening a present, her parting gift to me (a finally triumphant swordfight), only to find that the end of the unwrapping left a resonant, placid silence so pleasing to embrace.

My knees hurt; a timely shower of offal and fleshy clumps drizzled my head; my sword-arm fell crumpled. I thought it would take a month for my legs and knees to heal. Crawling and not willing to let myself turn lethargic from pain, I pawed over to A –'s claymore. Winner takes all, I remember thinking. And in the savage beastliness of the moment, I flung the sword across the battleground till it rested beneath a blood-splattered tree.

* * *

**5.**  
Most warriors, especially Clare, believe in this pagan veneration of fellow warriors' graves, marked by their lofty swords. Well, whenever I pass by that sword (and Clare would be mortified), I make sure I present a wreath of my most generous spittle.

* * *

_Edited: 10.10.08. _

_Originally written for Mikke, who inspired me with his Jean story. I was experimenting with short introductions & conclusions for my Short Story writing class as well. Comments & criticism is always welcome :) Thanks._


	5. Proximity

**Proximity (Khalwat)**

**1.**

"I want you to be there when I do it."

Clare stopped. The request unnerved her. "Why?" she asked Miria.

"What do you mean why?"

"It's got nothing to do with me. This is just between you and –"

Miria interrupted with her stare: a hard, overbearing stare. But when Clare threatened to harden her face with discontent, her leader's face eased into a small smile. She put her hand on Clare's shoulder.

"I need someone to be there with me."

"Why me?"

"Because you're less likely to take this the wrong way."

Clare grimaced. She still did not understand Miria's intentions; she still could not see exactly what she wanted, even though she believed they meant nothing ill. But the question of why her still did not take away her uncertainty.

She looked past Miria to where the weak sun, hidden behind brackish clouds, was pouring a feeble shadow across the mountains south of here. In the north, the sun was never a bright burning signal; it was always an insignificant smear, a wet orb cast aside by the wind or the permanent ocean of dark clouds –

"Clare. CLARE." Miria's face replaced the mountains. "I-need-you-to-help-me."

She lowered her line of vision to take in Miria's face. She supposed there was nothing to lose.

"Fine. I'll be there then." She had trouble getting those words out. "Where?"

"Later today. After the sparring session." Miria eyed her again. Her hand tightened on her shoulder and slacked, falling away. Clare thought she did look a bit grateful, although she did not need to be. She was their leader anyway. "Come and find me."

She thought that Miria's hand had remained on her shoulder for quite some time.

* * *

**2.**

Clare knew what Cynthia would tell her: she was still too slow. For the entire hour, her attempts at getting that perfect angle and speed on her windcutter's draw was absent. She could feel lactic acid and a reservoir of restless yoki building up in her right arm, but she would not use the Quicksword. Later, when Yuma came in to spar with her, she accidentally angled her draw too much to the right, and drew a cut across Yuma's undefended left thigh. Yuma did not mind, but Clare still admitted it was a careless blunder.

Cynthia made a comment that she was a bit jittery today. Clare ignored it. Clare pressed her tongue in between the edges of her teeth, fighting back the urge to let her menacing streak of yoki loose. She bit down hard and forced her strength into her biceps, where the energy for drawing the windcutter would come from. The three of them repeated the routine till everyone except Clare was bent over with exhaustion, kneeling in the half-melted snow, knees damp.

Clare spat blood to the ground, reminding herself to heal her tongue. She motioned to Yuma that she needed to leave; she knew they would not bother, they were already accustomed to her not being overtly sociable.

She sheathed her Claymore. Clare wandered through down the trail from where they usually had their sparring sessions. Somewhere within the dead forest she could hear Helen's laughter, the chiming of swords and, from above her, Cynthia asking aloud to Yuma if she had seen Miria. Yuma said no.

She found Miria waiting by the still-frozen mountain stream, near the trail which led outward to the mountains. Her eyes were closed, her hands crossed at the chest, head lowered. But her eyes snapped open the minute Clare approached.

"Come on," Miria said. Then paused as if she had forgotten something.

"What?"

"You know that I really appreciate your help, Clare."

"I'm sure you do." It was an innocent statement. She had not meant anything more.

Miria led her down the slope. Clare noticed her pace was unusually un-leader-like: she was clumsily sliding down the scree slope, dislodging rocks and noisily removing leafless branches from the path. She wondered if Miria was nervous, but shook that absurd thought out of her head. She also saw that Miria was unarmed.

They came to patch of woodland when the snow had already melted, exposing sharp, black granite slices of rock. Bare clumps of straw-coloured grass were forcing its way through the soil. There were even specks of alpine flowers near the bases of some of the trees. Miria looked back at Clare first, but did not stop.

She became aware of someone else ahead. Clare slowed her steps as she saw who it was. A voice greeted Miria. Miria did not respond very wholeheartedly. Then Clare, taking the final deliberately slowed steps, caught up to her leader.

At once she saw Tabitha's face crumple.

"Miria, what is _she_ doing here?"

Clare did not defend herself. It would be pointless. Instead, she waited. Like Miria, she saw Tabitha was without her Claymore.

"Is she –?"

Miria cut Tabitha off with a wave of her hand. "It's not what you think." She turned back to Clare, gesturing to a convenient patch of rock. "Why don't you sit?"

"I'll stand. Thanks."

Clare crossed her arms over her chest, watching as both Miria and Tabitha sat, facing each other. She was beginning to think that agreeing to accompany Miria here was a bad idea. The weight of her Claymore nudged her. She felt like she was a bodyguard watching over the two of them.

"Do you know why we're here?" Miria asked Tabitha.

"Why? Is there any specific reason, Miria-sama?"

"I'm asking you."

"You asked me to come. You said you wanted to talk."

Miria gave a huff. Clare thought she was acting as if one huge obstacle had just been cleared.

"How am I going to phrase this?" Miria said aloud.

"Phrase what?"

Now, Clare thought, Miria looked really uncomfortable. She was staring straight at Tabitha relentlessly; it reminded Clare of when Miria was back in Pieta, fumbling and agonizing over their situation. This time Miria was moving her fingers, tapping into the rock with a thumb. But she did not offer any suggestions; she thought if Miria needed any help, she would ask for it.

Miria looked across at the mountains. Pieta was beyond them.

"The mountains look better in the spring, don't they?" she said. "We should return to Pieta soon to pay our respects too, yes?"

Clare thought the mountains looked the same. And she did not want to return to the ruins. She loathed that place. But Tabitha silently nodded.

"Tell me, Tabitha. You've been in my company for close to several months now since Pieta. Do you think I've been a good enough leader?"

Tabitha looked horrified. "Miria-sama, why are you asking me this?" For the first time her eyes darted to Clare, then back to Miria. "I would not have it any other way. You single-handedly saved us from death, and have kept us alive since then. You've trained, fed, nursed us back to life – I mean – I – You have always been my leader. I'd go to hell and back with you."

A bird somewhere in the forest was stirred and called out.

"I see," Miria said. "Then would you listen to me if I said I would want to give you some advice?"

"You know I will, Miria-sama."

"Good. Between the two of us, Tabitha – we have a problem. Do you think we have a problem?"

"Problem?"

"Just answer the question."

The sharp edge to Miria's tone took Clare by surprise too.

"We have a problem," she repeated, "between you and me."

Tabitha's fingers unconsciously went up to her ponytail.

"You know what I'm talking about, don't you?"

The girl took her eyes off Miria, looking at the ground instead, silent.

"Your behaviour, your gestures, some of the things you say to the others."

Clare half-expected Tabitha's answer: "I never viewed it as a problem, Miria-sama."

"Honestly, neither did I until what happened the other night," Miria's strong tone was now fraying. She sounded exasperated. "Look. Really. Look – Tabitha, I don't know who taught you this. But this is certainly not the place for this kind of thing."

"But you enjoyed it, didn't you?"

Miria tensed. Clare thought the comment was a bit too bold. And quite foolish.

"You might think me old-fashioned, Tabitha, but there are words for these things."

Tabitha stayed silent this time. Her head was still lowered.

"There are words to describe this. Immoral, I believe. I think perversion would be a better word. Don't you think so, Clare?"

Clare did not like to think Miria was using her to prove a point. She resented being treated that way. So she just said tonelessly: "Whatever you say."

"Perversion. Against the natural order of things."

"_No_."

"Immoral. But I still prefer perversion."

"No, it isn't. Stop it, Miria-sama! Stop!"

"I told you we had a problem."

"It's not immoral. It's not perversion."

"Really?"

"Did you drag me out here just to humiliate me in front of another person?"

For the first time, Clare felt for Tabitha. She looked angry, and Clare knew she was not angry at Miria, but at her, just for being there and watching something which should have been between the two of them. But Clare chose not to say anything. She told herself she would stay silent for the rest of this meeting.

"I care about you, Miria-sama. That's why –"

"This is not a question about who cares for whom."

Tabitha got up. She looked like she was going to approach Clare. For a while, Clare thought she was going to seize the Claymore from her and do something incredibly stupid. But instead, the girl turned and walked to a nearby tree. She stared past the still leaf-less branches and out at the mountains, breathing deeply. A shaggy clump of dark raincloud was moving along the crest of the distant hills, and its shadow obscured the forests which ran around the peaks like a beard.

"Then what's this question about?"

"It's about you knowing that our situation isn't very rosy."

"I know."

"And I don't want the others to think that you are doing these kind of things with their leader. I'm their leader too."

"I know, Miria-sama."

"And I don't want them to think that you can't keep yourself under control."

"I know."

"Then do you know that you're distracting? I'm trying to keep us all alive and you're – you're – cuddling up to me like a baby at night."

When Tabitha, Clare saw she was blinking, her face unreadable.

"Come on, come back and sit down," Miria said. "Don't cry on me now, Tabitha."

"I won't, Miria-sama. I promised you. And I won't."

She returned, sniffing, but otherwise she continued to look at the ground.

"You've got to realise that there are seven, not just the two of us," Miria said to her. "I don't want the others to think of you badly."

"You don't think of me badly do you, Miria-sama?"

"What do you think?"

"I'd do anything for you not to think of me badly, Miria-sama."

"Then would you please please don't do what you did other night again. Especially with some of the others watching."

"I won't. You know I won't. I swear."

"Thank you."

Miria exhaled, the trail of her breath visible in the cold. Clare continued to wait.

"I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to be sorry about, Miria-sama."

"One last thing."

"Anything."

"Don't say, 'Miria-sama'. I'm not any better, or any more capable than you," she said, her face finally taking back some the resolve that so marked her decisions and strength. "I'm just like you. I'm only a so-called leader until the time comes for something else. Understood?"

"I understand, Miria,"

"Thank you."

"You're ever welcome."

Tabitha seemed to hesitate. But she got up again, and strode over to Miria. And she embraced her in one smooth, uninterrupted move. Whether or not Miria was surprised, she did not show it. Instead, she let Tabitha rest her head on her right shoulder, and began stroking her hair with one hand, the other firmly gripping the rock, to keep them from falling over.

"I'm sorry if you were hurt by the things I said," went Miria.

Tabitha flashed her eyes at Clare. But she knew what to do already: Clare, rolled her still-bleeding tongue in her mouth, and left the two of them alone in private. She traversed the woods, now filled with the echoing, tapping consistency of a woodpecker, and waited by the slope which led back up to their cam p.

Not long after, Miria joined her, silently moving through the woods to the slope, alone.

"Well?"

"She wanted to be alone for a little while longer."

"I can tell," Clare purposely adjusted her tone for the next statement. "Why did you want me present, Miria?"

Miria gave Clare the look she was accustomed to getting from her leader. It was a strict, no-nonsense look.

"Fine. I shouldn't have asked then."

Miria gripped Clare's arm; her fingers locked themselves over her right bicep, already sore from making all those fast draws during the sparring session. Clare felt uneasy, more so now than back in those woods. Miria had never touched her before: her cold fingers pressing against her muscles.

"Don't get me wrong, Clare," Miria said. Then she let go. "I just wanted someone present who would be mature enough to know why I did what I did back there."

She did not say any more, but started up the slope.

* * *

**3.**

Cynthia had made a small fire in centre of the cave. Not that they required warmth, but a fire was always something good at night.

The slow flame was dancing, throwing shadows over the walls of the cave. Clare believed that, compared to other caves, this one further up the mountain had more room. She found a corner away from the rest, and had removed the scabbard that held her Claymore. She leaned back against a finger of rock, watching the others while trying to polish her teeth with the empty iron taste of dried blood.

Helen was bragging that she had beaten Deneve today in a fight to anyone who might be listening, which meant just Cynthia and Yuma. She was making animated impressions with her hands about how clumsy Deneve was, or how much skill went into her triumphant swordplay. She said in the same breath Deneve was "like a drunken chicken" today, which made her audience laugh themselves hoarse. Her partner, however, was nowhere in sight, unable to defend herself.

Miria was near the entrance of the cave, slouched by the wall. She had volunteered to keep watch first. She was chuckling at Helen's words.

And Tabitha was sitting alone, on the outer rim of Helen's group, quietly observing them.

Sometimes she would catch Clare's vision, and eye her blankly. Clare, already tired at all the staring games played before this evening, ignored her.

For a while Clare thought of nothing. She wanted to empty her mind of everything that had gone on through the day: an eventful day, no doubt, but too eventful for her. She also wanted Tabitha to stop staring at her.

When she next turned her eyes to the others, Cynthia was talking now, and the others listening. Tabitha was now sitting close beside Miria, who did not seem to mind that their legs were almost touching. Or at least that was what Clare could see from where she was. Once in a while, Tabitha would lean in and speak something to Miria, who would smile weakly, but who was otherwise too preoccupied with watching the fire.

Clare felt she had seen enough. She rose, moved past everyone to the exit of the cave without a word. Miria, who had both her hands where Clare could see them, cast a questioning look at her, her eyes glowing brightly with the reflection from the fire. Tabitha avoided eye contact completely.

It was snowing gently outside. As expected, Clare saw Deneve standing alone at the entrance, eyes closed, back resting on the rock.

"You are a sore loser," Clare said to her.

"I reserve the right not to be the present subject of Helen's bragging once in a while."

Clare joined Deneve. In front of them was an absolute swath of the thickest darkness, spoiled only by insignificant, miserably distant stars.

"I see you and Miria did some talking with Tabitha today."

Clare did not want to give Deneve the satisfaction of catching her off guard. She merely replied, "So we did."

"How did Miria's pet take it?"

"Why don't you ask Miria or Tabitha yourself?"

"I don't intrude into things that are none of my business."

"Are you implying something, Deneve?"

Deneve gave Clare a small smile. Which was rare. Clare could tell she was enjoying their conversation, although to her it felt more like rumour-mongering. But she continued anyway.

"I didn't say that," she said slowly. "I'm just saying Miria doesn't pick me to help her do her dirty work."

"Whatever you say."

"Do you honestly think Miria dragged you all the way down there just so you could watch her tell Tabitha off?" Deneve said. "And do you honestly think Miria isn't enjoying herself with all that attention?"

Clare did not want to think of it now. She was actually feeling a bit tired.

"Do you honestly think Miria doesn't like –"

"Yes, I do." Clare cut her off. "And you?"

"Seeing is believing," Deneve grinned.

"You and your anecdotes."

Deneve laughed out. Clare could tell she enjoyed talking about Miria, and Tabitha, and the others. She believed it was the consequence of being with them together so often, too close to say anything that might offend them. This short conversation actually gave her time to say what she really thought.

The two of them did not exchange another word until Clare went back in to relieve Miria of her watch. Instead they stared out at the blank, black canopy of mountain and sky. The lofty, proud mountain crags were not visible in the dark. Only one or two obvious stars remained, not shut out by cloud.

She returned inside when it was time. Only Yuma and Helen were awake, talking quietly. Near the entrance, with her arms crossed at her chest, Miria had fallen asleep on Tabitha's shoulder. One of Tabitha's arms remained strung across Miria's shoulders, as if it had intended to pull her leader closer to her.

Clare believed that if Miria was afraid of setting the wrong impression, she would have said something. But she didn't. So Clare took the watch, sitting silently at the opposite wall of the entrance.

She did not want to wake them.

* * *

Edited: 01/11/2008 with help from T35.

As the title story, this one-shot is supposed to be the crux of the entire collection. Whether it is or not, I'll leave that up to everyone else to decide.


	6. A Narrow Space

**A Narrow Space**

**1.**

Flora runs her fingers down the ragged grip of her sword. She lets out a sigh. She squints at the distance ahead. But she knows delay is unwholesome and unprofessional.

She tries not to imagine the words of her handler, already repeated a thousand times; he always slurs when it comes to reminding her to finish as fast as possible so that her services can be utilized elsewhere. And she gets more impatient thinking about the task – the regular, banal, cut-and-slash task: a mission – no, a motion, –any hired hand swinging a sword can do.

But work is work. She erases her hold on the hilt. A flex of her elbow, a slight numbing of her shoulders, and the blade is back in its position of perched safety on her back, nestled gingerly in its sheath, lodged tightly in the small of her back. An armoured back.

She wants to waste time to scour her eyes with the dirty yellow shroud that the morning sun provides. She wishes she can finish her breakfast, to savour the remaining sticks of wild game while watching the easterly wind paw and scratch its way through the overgrown scrub.

But work is work. Work is saving lives. And she must finish this business by tonight.

Who knows what evil tomorrow will bring? she tells herself. But she knows the question is overly subjective for someone like her to answer.

* * *

**2.**

Flora waits and watches, in the hollow of several tall trees. The designated town lies in the valley below: a cluttered congregation of boxy houses cramped into a river's meander, like a scattering of child's toys on the edge of some giant carpet. She observes: pencil-like strokes of chimney smoke indicate habitation, the spread of maize-coloured fields beyond suggest an agricultural outpost, and the lack of visible activity – she cannot be sure –

Probably collective paranoia.

And the filthy stain of yoki, so blatant, finds its way to her, like a decayed morsel of a meal left served for too long. She thinks it's too obvious, too flamboyant even for a hungry yoma to display his yoki like a red flag in such a quiet town. But at the moment, she does not think it relevant: just a technicality, a death wish, an invitation.

She manages an easy pace. The entire valley basking before her narrows down into a single rock-straddled path, dumped with wrecks of shepherds' fences, wildflower overgrowth and cattle faeces. The trees, now overtaken by more demure vegetation, trail away, and soon she forgets the shade and security the hollow atop the hill provides. The sunshine, she sees, casts an outline of dark shadow around everything. The day, she feels, is beginning to turn against her.

When she reaches the foot of the rise, boxed in by the twin knolls of both sides of the valley, she can see the first few houses, mud-stained into brown and overwhelmed with vines, a stretch of river shore peeking from behind their crowded forms. She knows: she does not expect a welcome; there is no one in sight anyway. Nonetheless, she twirls a lock of hair. She is still worried – although neutrally-concerned is the better word – about how they will see her.

She crosses the threshold. A window slams. Glass carpets her way as she observes some houses. There is blood on a windowsill. Oh yes – there is blood. She ignores the implications. She treks straight down the main street of the deserted town, the sun still mutelessly holding its gaze in the upper right of her vision, imprinting a glow onto everything she sees. She senses human flesh, hiding, crouching, afraid, cowering. She knows, she knows, the yoma is among them too.

At the end of the main street is the muddy little river, its meander so pronounced its banks have carved slops and sandbars for boats. The water is stagnant, rich in waste, invaded by sedge and other plants Flora never tried to learn. She decides she is not going to learn anything from indulging in the pitiless scenery, so she tries to sweep the town, starting first at the nearest house to the river.

She does not bother to knock. An elbow to the door, and then a push, probably a kick with her right foot, always lends her an entrance. But her easy progress confirms her suspicions: the town is abandoned. Flora persists anyway, because the Organizations orders cannot be wrong.

There is a house with a thrashed porch, and an assortment of shattered ceramic around its door like fine powder.

She enters the dwelling. And the whole house collapses on her.

* * *

**3.**

Flora knows she has been ambushed. There were at least two yoma, but their attempt to contain her in a trap of just wood and brick is – at least she feels – completely amateurish. As the roof caves in, she punches her away the rotting rafters and then – and then – she spots the yoma. And then – and then – she is fast enough to catch the arm of one of them, aiming directly for her face.

The yoma's claws extend by almost double its length.

"You!" he shrieks.

She has him by the wrist, but as his nails extend, they start to graze her face – her cheek tingles. She has no hands, no room to draw her sword. The other yoma is circling, tearing down the beams that are starting to pelt down on her.

Coward! Fight me, monster!

"Then come and get me!" he yells. And the beams above slam across her outstretched elbows.

She knows it's now or never. The yoma's claws flay once across her face. She feels them dig into her earlobe. She knows if she doesn't do it now – she knows – she knows she won't survive the ambush –

When she feels the yoki in flowing down from her wrist she forces it into her fingers, and clamps it down on the offending arm. She seizes the yoma's wrist, and pulls the entire arm in an arc across the room.

"Freak!"

Her hands are free for weaponry. Her fingers, now yoki-enhanced, just need one sweep – one draw of her sword – and then everything around her turns into a swirling mass of wind-burning debris. Including the yoma.

The remnants of the house fly themselves in a circle around her. The second yoma, defenceless, stares, dumbly, standing in the middle of the debris like fish out of water.

"Witch! Can't even fight without using your –"

Flora doesn‎'t wait. She flicks her wrist like she has so many times. And then all she feels is the wind.

There are no more monsters. Not even body parts; just fragments. Splinters. Blood.

From among the other ruined houses, men and women and children begin to appear, scattered like the destroyed house all around her. They are whispering. She thinks it's because she's been disheveled from the fight, that her hair is completely in a mess. But, unconsciously, as she strokes her hair into place, she finds her palms drenched in blood.

* * *

**4.**

"– to the man in black –"

They are not even interested. They do not even offer her water to wash her wounds. They simply stand around, whispering, murmuring, rudely. Like the sheep they raise, they watch and gape at her, rigid.

Flora decides it is not worth the trouble to stay. She does not need people to keep pointing at the lacerations on her face. She glances at them another time, and then moves away from the wrecked house, in the direction of where she knows she will be getting another command to kill more yoma. She fixes her Claymore, and then she filters through the thickening crowd.

But then she hears, amidst the din, a child's voice: "Is that a Claymore?"

Someone tells him to be quiet, but she cleanly hears the boy's retort:

"She's beautiful!"

She slows; she does not come to a complete stop until she passes from the crowd. Ahead of her she sees the crest of the rise, the stripes of cloud-shadow criss-crossing the sides of the valley like a ladder that she knows she needs to climb sooner or later. Sheep bleat from behind her; the growling of the low voiced crowd. And the whiny, high-pitched voice:

"But she _is_ beautiful!"

With her hand covering her scratched face, she about-turns. The child is pointing at her; but his finger, his stare, his exciting jabber, is not accusatory.

The ladder to another town can wait for now, she decides.

* * *

**EDIT: **

_My shortest fic. A simple story done to zoom in one a single character & setting. Also written for a Flora fan in July 08 who wanted a fic written on her favourite character. Comments appreciated. Thanks._


	7. The Sound of Bells

**The Sound of Bells**

****

1.  
Even though it was Yuma's idea, she still consented to follow her. It would be her first time in the place Clare called a cathedral.

Tabitha felt there was no specific purpose behind this visit: it was like one of those excursions to retrieve Clare they used to conduct back in the north – just without the troublesome complications of dealing with Clare's character. And when Yuma had proposed it, even Clare agreed to follow; though it appeared clear she looked quiet with a kind of shadowy disinterest. And Deneve, who mumbled something about Yuma being unnecessarily curious, still chose to follow them anyway.

By the time they entered the largest section of the building – which she assumed belonged to the benevolent man Miria was talking to upstairs – spear-lengths of sunshine tore through the eaves of the building. They struck out at divine, chaotic angles, littering the vast space with scars of unfiltered light. On all sides of the room were mouldy, darkened windows which stared outwards at the world around. But they did not catch any light, and Tabitha saw they seemed as drab as the walls.

She threw a glance across the entire space like she would an unfamiliar terrain in battle: an excessive, divided space. Messy, but still cluttered with a sense of orderliness. The blank windows like guards watching the outside (or was it inside?). The eaves like eyelids blinking with sunlight. The ceiling, vaulted, soaring beyond her. The stocky pillars. The cravings that flourished like stale, stone flowers from the tops of those pillars.

Planks – furniture she had never seen such seats before – long, snake-like, like tidily-shaved trunks of trees parting only to reveal one accurately central path down to the centre of the room. And then: a table, a platform, an assembly of thrones.

Above it, poking out of the dark stone walls like it should not be there: a haze of blood red, tan gold, bruise blue. A glistening, painfully bright slice of glass and colour seemingly embedded without purpose in the drab serious wall above them, like a jewel poking its sparkle from a mound of earth.

She turned to Deneve. "What is it?" she asked.

"What is what?"

"That."

When she saw Deneve –her eyes ground-wards, shielded, not even bothering to look – she knew she would not answer. Tabitha turned instead to Clare.

"Some work of art."

Clare tried again: "Someone painted it I think."

"But don't you think it's beautiful, Clare?"

Yuma, eclipsed by Clare's lack of a response, nodded instead.

She thought a word such as _beautiful_ did not exist in Clare's vocabulary; and even if it did, Clare seemed loathe to use it. Still, Tabitha saw, she followed the ascending glances of Yuma and herself to the flashy mess of colours. From behind it, she saw the sun had smeared a template of shades, washing across in invisible waves of morning humidity, over the ground they were standing.

"It's called stained glass."

But Deneve was now looking back out the way they came, at the black timber doors like gates into the vicinity of this silent, nervous underworld.

"But." She saw Yuma look to Deneve and back up at the object. "What's it supposed to mean?"

This time Deneve looked right Yuma in the eye: "And how would I know?"

Tabitha drifted over to where the pool of sun-torched reflection of the stained glass ended; she thought she had just slipped into a water-less pond and out again. She posited herself at the bare box of heavy-set wood rising from the floor. _Pulpit_, Deneve called it. (So many new words!) A table beyond it – elaborately dressed with gold skirting, a green cloth surely, surely more luscious than Cynthia's tresses – laden with assorted objects left there so purposely they insisted some greater motive circulated in the very air around them.

She was waiting for Deneve to sacrifice the silence for an explanation. But instead Clare disrupted her; she watched as Clare, stealing her moment of quiet curiosity, clambered onto the – pulpit – and rose to her full height, like a scout. Only now she seemed to be trying survey the meaning behind everything they had observed so far.

"Clare are you sure –"

Deneve's all-knowing, all-seeing voice: "Let her do what she wants, Yuma."

She ignored all of them. Even Clare, who deftly plucked from within the – _pulpit_ – a book which appeared to be impersonating as a boulder. She shut them out first: there was the dazzling coloured image which blazed and cast its own shadow upon her to confront. She traced the lines and symbols, tooth-like chunks which blinked at her; blinking, she felt, like opulent, over-obvious eyes begging for her to interpret them.

She thought if she tried to close her eyes to consolidate the image, it would be easier That was how it was meant to be, wasn't it? A tried technique she knew never failed: in darkness, a yoki-lit circumference of shades and hues. But, now in light, a freckled, light-tossed flower of questionable design.

She opened her eyes. Clare stood beside her, their shoulders almost touching, tense as if on the climax of some great discovery. Her presence chipped away her own senses: Clare was that unsettling.

She edged away from Clare; recovering from her self-imposed darkness, her vision fraying to tatters of vivid, opague shades of gleaming stripes, she found herself fixated. There were images there. Yes – they were there. Now, only now, was she beginning to detach them from the greater morass of incoherent shapes on the glass. She knew they had a meaning. She knew – surely –

"Do you see them?" she asked Clare.

Clare's voice struck like a handful of snow: "The _things_ you see with those eyes of yours."

But she was seeing them; she was seeing them, so finely melded into the colours they seemed like blots of insignificance: a pack of panting, leering men's faces. A street of brown cobblestones so small and stoically drawn. A patch of houses, standing so plainly in the background scenery of the image, like flowers by a hillside. And at the focus of it: at the bottom left, a man, clearly wracked in pain, bloodied, surrounded by men, his face upturned at an infinitely twisted angle, dog-tongued, revolting.

His eyes, circles of swirling zero-points of black eyeing an atmosphere shrouded by clouds.

She stepped back, the image of the man hurting her eyes. She spoke, but to no one in particular: "What do they call this place again?"

"A cathedral."

"I think, Clare, that the proper name is a church."

She caught Clare as she flung an unsatisfied glare at Deneve, who was still slouching by the first row of the long wooden beams, with Yuma watching nearby.

"What purpose does it serve?"

Her echoing query made its way around them without an answer. Noticing Clare – slightly put off by Deneve – dusk her hands across the row of chairs, she moved into the unlighted corner of the _church/ cathedral. _The chairs were arranged so straight they seemed like a thicket of thrones.

"I think they pay respect to some person."

Paying respect - and what did that mean? As Tabitha traced the edges of carvings set into the walls she tried to imagine it: paying respect. The kind of respect she had for, say, Miria? That kind of respect? Or, throwing her eyes downwards to Clare – that kind of _respect? _

"Wait –"

She could feel their flickering presence even before she could see them, but Deneve had already drawn her weapon: two human men emerged from the doors. Within the light-torched window behind her, they were but twin pieces of movement, outlined fiercely by the central gap between the wooden planks. They paused halfway.

And then, they turned and disappeared, without acknowledging their presence.

Whether or not their appearance had anything to do with what occurred next, Tabitha was not completely sure. But shortly after, a deep ring, an echoing metallic chime surged through the entire place. It echoed once, then again, repeatedly, faithfully in the same two tones. Each tone, sharp and heavy, shook the windows, and made the furniture huddle in trembling.

"Bells."

Tabitha looked up. She knew they were coming from beyond the ceiling – if only she could –

"They're calling people to come," Deneve said again. "Let's go. We shouldn't stay."

She closed her eyes on Clare and Yuma making their exit. In the portion of darkness, raked by the mournful sound, she could still feel a faint, but warm, well of yoki through the deadness of the walls.

"Tabitha? You coming?"

Clare's voice overwhelmed her return to the interior of the Rabonan structure. _Me? Follow you? Now?_

"Miria is still here. So I'm staying"

She saw Clare shrug elaborately. She thought she heard her mutter "as usual" but at that moment the sound of the bells ended. And all she could hear were Clare's diminishing steps.

_

* * *

_

**2.**_  
As usual._

If only – if only – she could force that edgy sarcasm out from Clare's tongue. But there would be no use making a scene – _that Clare_ – and the idea was unsavoury. _That Clare_ – unstable, whiny, who did not care about whatever came from her mouth.

Tabitha sharpened her knuckles on her forehead: so she was a loyal warrior to her leader. And her leader was Miria. So what?

She waited in between the shade granted by two windows; the warped architecture gave enough shade for her to wait and be subtly mistaken for any of the statues littered in the sanctuary. Her position of camouflage kept away already insecure eyes – eyes flashing absently at her from the crowds of people ambling through the doors.

These guests milled around and finally came to rest on the wooden planks; others were to be found kneeling at the front, near the thing called the _pulpit. _She did not want to be noticed – but could not help observing them.

So was this the equivalent – no – the Rabonan example of paying respect? Or was it? Or were they waiting for something else?

She saw them, muttering, their heads falling steadfastly to the ground in a kind of numb, heaving repetition. Their hands were fitfully clasped with something she had once seen Miria – and, unbelievably, Clare – do, in a variation of many styles, types and manners. Something they called, in vague descriptive words, prayer – whatever it meant – something supposedly serious, forbidding interruption. Some kneeled so precariously: like they were waiting upon the graves at Pieta, in devotional ritual, in painful memory.

Only now there was no grave and no memory – she was certain she could not see any. Outlined by the drawling cast of a winged man, the crowd turned up-faced in one single direction – did that have a meaning, too?

(The form of the winged man, draped in stone, at ease with his sword – she tried not to look into his sheen-coloured eyes of plaster white. Prior to today, the only things with wings she had seen were yoma.)

A burdensome draft of silence. And the crowd turned quiet. Tabitha saw a man mount the _pulpit_ : the same soft-faced man who had been addressing Miria when they left her in one of the inner rooms. She picked out his garb. Surely – ceremonial, lucidly symbolic: all those uncanny symbols branded into the fabric. He walked with an air of a northern forest enchanted by snow-drenched light – something mysterious. The other visitors and guests actively acknowledged his presence as he stood and watched them from behind the _pulpit,_ like an eagle roosting on the highest peak.

Like the crowd, she paused to wonder. Is this the power this man has over other humans? The power that made Miria approach him equally, respectfully, calling him _father_ when (as all in the company of seven knew) she had no memory of her parents?

She saw his eyes rush in her direction: they made the slightest twitch, as if they could squint through the thick shadow and pick her out. She stared back. But his gaze already moved away, falling on the repetition of upturned faces like flowers pressing for the sun.

His voice spread outwards like a gale:

"It is written in the scriptures – the just shall live by faith!"

What an unusual combination of words! Tabitha, her mind thinking, clambered over the first wave of this phrase which this man had spoke with a storm-laced voice and a cut from his right arm. A meditative pause followed, and still thinking, she realized she could sense Miria's presence. The comfortable texture of its yoki seemed to be descending away from where she stood.

"Yes. It is the truth through which we are all here today. In the face of the tragedies and the miraculous rescue from a monster we have witnessed, though we have seen many martyred for our faith." A broad sweep to the panel of richly-gleaming colours behind. "Through it all – the just shall live by faith!"

Was he talking about her? No – about the company of the seven of them? Tabitha wanted to listen on, but Miria's fading presence exerted a greater force, pulling her from her hidden point – pulling her away from this man. This man and his glass structure and his big words.

* * *

**3.**  
She should have expected it. And she should have already predicted, understandably, the outcome of their meeting.

Miria, she felt, had long chosen not to exercise leadership or her trademark control over them. They were in the South now, free to make their own choices. So when all seven of them met to decide the next road to take, Tabitha knew their routes from Rabona (if they were to venture out at all) would diverge.

"As for me, I will stay and pray for your safe return."

Miria's voice, like a benediction, summed up the fulfillment of their agreement: they were going to separate. All seven of them would no longer be one company, one group. After seven years, she thought, Miria allowed the inevitable to pass.

And standing with them, on the ramparts of Rabona, watching, waiting for her comrades to evaluate their decisions, she tried not to make eye-contact with Clare. _Clare – _who was going to chase remotely, to the ends of the earth if she could, her mysterious ally, the phantom-like symbol of that boy whose only existence, Tabitha believed, laid in the conceptual realm of a desperate warrior with a flawed imagination.

She was sure Yuma, Cynthia – even possibly Miria – shared her view. But she dared not speak out. Steadying herself as Clare and Deneve embraced, she still waited on Clare. Even though she was taking Cynthia and Yuma away.

When it came to her turn, she took Clare's hug as steady as she could.

She took a clear, possibly final, sidelong look at the grinning Helen, then to Yuma and her unassuming conversation with a bright-eyed Cynthia. Behind them, in an almost startling clarity, she could see almost five miles from the banners on the Rabonan ramparts to a haze-worn land blossoming with hills, and overlaid with grey-bottomed clouds turning as they trudged through the sky.

What a clear day, she thought.

* * *

**4.**  
She followed Miria directly back to the – _cathedral_, leaving the other five to ready their preparations for departure. It did occur to her that only she and Miria would be the staying in Rabona – a final bastion for the city (plus the two recently defected warriors, plus the powerful blind nun) – but it did not come to her as a feeling. It seemed more an observation, something which should, properly, be so.

The door lay ajar. Inside, she took a moment to remember the surroundings. Unlike the last time she had entered the cathedral, the afternoon sun had now completely shuffled light, shade and darkness into new positions and degrees. The windows no longer divided the sanctuary into even portions of illuminated space and untended shade. Instead, they thrust a harsh afternoon glare towards the opposing wall, highlighting heads, legs, arms of the statues as if by diurnal accident. Everything else fell into a content shadow.

The fragment of swirling, hue-scattered reflections from the stained glass window had been tossed to the very head of the large space. Some of its colours seemed visibly twisted by the intensity of light.

A sword-like streak of pale red fell draped, possessively, on Miria's left shoulder. And Tabitha spotted her leader before the pulpit, her head lowered.

Tabitha approached. She could feel Miria's yoki, like a flare in the cramped half-light of the _cathedral _signaling her forward. The elder warrior gave no sign that she had noticed her closing in on her. Her head remained firmly, humbly sunk – Tabitha thought – into the devout solitude of the large figures in the stained glass that overwhelming her frame. Closer, just closer – and Tabitha saw, with a swelling discomfort, the faces of the evil, spear-tongued men in the glass image congregated around her leader like a pale crimson halo.

Was she – praying? She could only see the gently shut eyes, the clasped hands; she could feel the constant ebb and flow of Miria's breath. And the silent words, slipping from her lips into this repressed atmosphere, unheard but having meaning.

When she advanced further, Miria stirred, spoke:

"Tell me, Tabitha. Do you trust me?"

_Trust me_. Why the question? And what a question! Miria still had yet to rise from her position. With her forehead still aimed at the ground, Tabitha could almost imagine another voice from within the room had deceived her.

"Tabitha?"

Her name framed in her leader's throat like a plea: she knew Miria wanted more than just opinion. _Trust. _Standing square to Miria, she could almost feel the dancing, flaking yoki energies of her other five comrades in their supposed anticipation to depart Rabona. She could feel both their excitement and their anxieties accumulating, in the hushed, rapid whispering that Miria made.

And _trust_. Tabitha stormed deep into her thoughts to frame that word with Miria's almost hunching, penance-burdened form. _Trust. _Trust Miria like the man in the stained glass window, whose colours were absorbing them in a dissolving shroud of light – like that man's _trust _in his own god, _trust _to the point of shattering, screaming, resplendent sacrificial death –

But the answer never found any challenge, imagined or not:

"You know better than to ask me, Miria," Tabitha said. Her tone had quickened, like she intended it to be a trivial joke. From a certain perspective, she could not help thinking so.

"Our trust in you has gotten this far."

She thought she saw the edges Miria's mouth thin like a blade. But she confronted her with another question:

"Did I do the right thing, Tabitha? Was I right in letting all of them leave?"

Tabitha began to feel a second uneasy feeling numb her thoughts. Miria still remained stagnantly in place, the last words of the question swallowing the air around them.

"You're our leader. We know, down to the very last breath, that you are right."

She exhaled. The effort in putting her thoughts into words took a satisfying but tiresome toll on her tongue, her head, her own imagination of the Miria she knew: the phantom touch of her reassurance and the strong power in her voice. Tabitha did not want either to fall from her.

In the grating silence, Miria's eyes finally glowed back to life. Not facing Tabitha, she spoke once more: "Maybe you should reconsider you decision to stay. There's nothing here –"

Enough – enough questioning –

Tabitha saw her hands reach out to her leader – she saw them soften into her shoulders – and then, her leader's eyes aflame, body tense beneath the sword-grip of her own palms, Miria's face was before hers.

"Why do you ask me?" Tabitha wanted it to be a question too. But it had all the harshness of a demand.

Do you not _trust_ me?

Miria linked their arms, and Tabitha felt the press of her hands; she felt almost like her shoulders were being lifted. She tried her utmost to stare into her leader's eyes, being unable many times before to withstand her glare.

Miria shrugged. "I've been afraid for them. I don't know how many will return alive."

Tabitha felt warmed by the intense closeness in, and of, those words. She wanted to maintain the stare, hold the glazed, steady line of sight Miria possessed. _If this was what trust felt like_ – she choose, in that split-second – to lower her arms, thawed from their rash move from Miria's shoulders. Until it was Miria who was steadying her.

"That's why I'm here."

"That's why you will have at least me when you choose to move out."

"And –"

Tabitha would never admit that, with Miria's arms forming a saving bridge between them, she would expect Miria to pull her close and embrace her. But Miria did. And when Miria – with her stoned-faced frown untouched, her thin lanky arms taunt and (probably) unable to withstand any longer, her fragrant locks grazing the side of her right cheek, her angular chin like a sword's hilt, planting and stabbing itself in the slope of flesh on Tabitha's shoulder – did, all Tabitha could remember seeing were the downward-flashing eyes of the men in the stained glass painting, made greasy by the light. She saw them – and she pressed her arms tighter around Miria's neck.

"You know I have no one else to follow –"

She did not mean it to be an emotional confession, or a observation point. To her, it was a mere statement of fact.

* * *

**5.**  
She awoke to an anticipated absence of light. The underside of her thighs were numb with the cold – a cold bursting from the harsh stone floor, clinging to a long stretch of her skin. She took several moments to recall the surroundings. Her world, blurred by early morning serenity, burned into understanding.

_The cathedral. The pulpit. The stained glass window – _

No light decorated the stained glass window. And now it looked discoloured and inconsistent, like someone had shattered a pane and left it in its place .

She unfurled Miria's arm from her shoulders, taking care not to wake her. In her sleep Tabitha thought she could pass off as dead: completely silent and still. Miria's arm beckoned to her like a gesture urging her to remain. But Tabitha rose, following the nearest shred of light, and ending up at a misted window.

And as she watched the city slowly searching its way out of shadow into a sluggish creep of sunlight, the bells high above her sounded in a single chorus: a solid echo that flew across the still quiet city faster than light, faster than her own eyes –

She tried to imagine that after this morning there would be neither Helen to laugh along with, nor Clare to get resentful at. _Clare, Yuma, Cynthia, Deneve, Helen – _they were waiting to depart. They were waiting to disappear into the blind clarity of the opening day.

But now she shook the cold from her, running a palm down her arms. She moved back to Miria, still at ease with the impending sunlight and continuous striking of bells. And, lowering herself, she warmed Miria's upturned forehead with a kiss.

"Wake up," she whispered.

She found her voice drowned by the chanting echo all around, the two of them alone in the company of its deep music, untouched by morning light.

* * *

_EDIT: Written to compliment Proximity. Static setting, but a bit emo. Please tell me your comments._


	8. Men

**Men**

* * *

_Thanks to Yosei (Buddhacide), MisterJB & Hell - who helped to comment & shape this 2nd revision of the story. Rated M for figurative violence/ sex.  
_

* * *

**1.**

Just south of Pieta, over the ridge where we first fought, is Giresan town. And that is where the inn is.

All trade from heading south from Alphonse has to flow needs to past down the winding forest road leading to Giresan, so we suspect it had always been entertaining highwaymen and traders and all sorts of company for years, possibly even before our arrival in the north. It filters away only a few regular customers, though, but somehow the brew there is the best I ever tasted: all of Alphonse's finest barley needs to stopover at the inn before going south. All that barley. _Imagine that_.

* * *

**2.**

The inn was where I first saw her. Like us, yet very much different. Back then, while still recovering from my wounds from that ill-prepared fight, I would be brought to the inn, sometimes to a room, and at others just to the front porch to watch the world slouch by. The master had been always kind enough to give me a room with a view.

So I had been well-prepared for the warrior's arrival. Even when facing the wall, trying to heal the arrow cuts and the carved slices in my side like gorges burrowed deep in my skin, the warrior never did bothere to mask her scent. A half-monster, half-lavender scent, a yoki-flowered pulse of sub-innocence. Sometimes she would throw my her eyes at me, as if thinking she had seen something – a lion or a monster, or both, perhaps – where I lay watching. But she still would enter the inn, her armoured boots a crescendo of expectation, a steady, almost predictable rhythm.

I have little experience with her kind. But I know she is short for a monster-slayer. We could stand head-to-head: a small, athletic, tense body. And from the first time I saw her, I have always deemed her unnaturally bronzed, as if by being half-human the foul Northern climate had a reverse-effect on her, or as if she had trekked seven hundred kilometres through the sunshine-drenched south just to hunt monsters here.

She never takes longer than a moment in the inn. A cup of warm goat's milk. Hardly a glance at the customers, who hardly glance back. And before anyone can see the frame of stray milk around the crest of her lips, she exits. The customers do not really bother.

As I watch her trudge away, in the directions of the mountains and towards Pieta, I catch her silhouette, obvious and silvery blatant, like a stick of meat left in between the teeth after a meal. And then the forest swallows her. But she will return, I tell myself, no need to fret.

Drinking from the flagon, the brew whirlpools in the back of my throat.

And Isley echoes my thoughts: "She'll be back. The forests are full of yoma anyway."

* * *

**3.**

The drizzle starts around the late afternoon. It is not so much a drizzle than a mist. But we feel no need to hurry; it is, after all, only November. A little rain never did us any harm anyway.

At the bar, our favourite master is cooking something foul, stirring his squirrel-nibbled ladle over a cauldron battered enough to be a trebuchet's firing load. He pays no heed to us – which is probably because he knows who we are, and what we are here for, and that we are only good for his business – so the arrangement for now works out fine between us. We hunker down at our favourite table, far enough from the door to remain hidden, but in the close vicinity to entertain ourselves should a brawl erupt.

The master sets down the flagons. Isley empties a handful of beras for the service. For some reason, he always has gold on him, even though outside of this place he has really no need for them. And he always pays, saying that between us brothers-in-arms he is obliged, as the superior, to be magnanimous. So he says. But I always let him have the first sip.

The rim of the flagon has hardly departed from his lips when he says: "She's coming."

I lean back into the blood-brown oak chair. It responds with a creak. And I ask him:

"So what are your thoughts?"

"She's not your type."

"And?"

"She will know. And then we'll have trouble."

Isley's tone does not change. He cups the flagon and drinks again, and gestures at my untouched drink, wiping the froth from his chin. The compelling extension to the subject at hand nudges with urgency:

"And then?"

"You're not listening to me."

"What is there to listen?" Partaking in my own drink, the pause levels the tension. "I'm not asking for advice. I'm asking for an opinion."

He leans, crosses his legs, the great sweep of his fur-coat makes him look as if he had the potential to sprout wings, to fly himself away out of this slum in the north. He nods carefully, says, "It's my job to give you advice. It's your mission to heed it."

"You hypocrite."

"At least I can live my life without using that thing between my legs."

We settle into an exploited silence, which we both use in different ways: he to properly don his cloak and I to empty my flagon. As always and as expected, only the aftertaste registers. And only in the most distant region of the tongue – a hard, almost oat-like descent of watery flavour. It lingers, then disappears before I can even put a name to it.

He has his head resigned to a mocking angle. "You should just admit it," he tells me.

"I have nothing to admit."

"You just want her in bed. Or under the pine tree. Or in a some bear's cave near the hills."

I pull a sarcastic grin: "Again, you self-righteous bastard."

"Priscilla is different," he excuses.

"At least this one's of age."

"At least," Isley corrects himself and throws a look at the door. "At least I don't pretend she needs it."

"She does."

"And what do we call this?" he questions. His finger is curled, accusatory. "A necessary bedding?"

"Well –"

A therapeutic fuck?"

"She needs it. She needs someone to love her."

"Love is outdated."

At that moment, the doors open silently. The opportunity-seeking wind brings with it the scent of pine trees, a dusting of dead pine needles and a fully-armed warrior. She takes six strides and the master of the tavern rotates banally to attend to her. I see a tilted cup being filled with white.

"You think you know everything," I snarl. And clutching my flagon, I stand and prepare to leave.

"I do," he smiles gently, girlishly.

"You're not a real man."

As I depart from the table, his voice travels like a whisper on the scattering remnants of my conscience:

"Do real men even exist?"

* * *

**4.**

The master chucks several knobs of wilted potatoes and bloody fragments to meat into his pathetic cauldron, and revises his ritual. So he does not see me at the counter table.

She does not bristle when the extreme slice of my sleeve and my arm sweep gently across her shoulder. Her portion of goat's milk is snuggled deep in her palm, her gaze downcast, a lock of her silver-blonde hair traces a lone line down her face.

"Are there yoma up north?" I ask, gently, voice half-clear.

I watch her bring the residue of the goat's milk in her cup to her lips. They hardly part, but she downs the drink in the blink of an eye. A trail of white escapes from the corner of her mouth, but she contains it. And the smudge of the liquid hangs by her lower lip.

"Many." She stiffens. "I have to go now."

"They can wait. Here," I gesture to the master who, betrays the faintest shade of surprise at, I suppose, the unlikely couple. "Drink with me."

The dampness of her voice is smooth, close to flawless:

"I am sorry. There are things for me to do."

She moves, and before I can prevent myself, a hand fastens itself on her wrist.

"No, I insist." As if to affirm the proposal, there are now two cups of goat's milk beside us.

Her small eyes do not widen, but it is clear she is not accustomed to this. For a short moment she stares past the entire inn, into a distance deeper than imagination. Another customer decides at that moment to enter, and as the wind rushes in, I watch the shadows of the late afternoon creep up, then down, her outstretched thighs.

"You're drunk," she declares.

"Enough to tell you are not. Enough to tell you will surprise yourself if you stay."

She is still standing, but she grasps the helping of goat's milk anyway. I imitate her gesture, and swallow the victual with a simple gulp. My senses fail to register anything but a waxy, succulent wash of liquid.

"What's your name, warrior?"

She flinches. "I really need to leave." And she darts from her place, and is out the door before I can even stand.

There is no need for me to glimpse back at Isley. Because is still sipping ambivalently from his flagon, and he will probably not follow me out in my pursuit.

* * *

**5.**

The woods are devoid of life. Wind rakes the flood after flood of leaves and dead pine-needles into the solitary path which leads to the mountains. No one uses this road: too many yoma, too little refuge, too many places for ambush.

She knows someone is following her. She slows at the first ridge, and by the time I reach her she has her hand to her Claymore, facing me, taking a guard.

She forces me to stop, fifteen paces away from her, beside the trunk of a stripped pine tree.

"If you don't stay away, I will have to make you," she warns, a half-hearted attempt.

"Why not lower your sword and we can walk?"

The drizzle intensifies, but like a curtain it completely takes over the narrow forest road. The trees continue their silent observation. A bird noisily calls over us. She hesitates.

"Who are you?" she calls over the silence.

"Let's not talk standing still," I say, and I narrow the distance to ten paces. "Let's walk back to the inn before this rain gets worse."

She draws her Claymore in one astute, symbolic swing, like wave of a bird taking flight. Its polished, sharpened tip nods in my direction. Her outstretched, spindly fingers twirl around the hilt, whitened with the snow. The wind pushes her fringe aside, outlining caution – or fear? – or determination? – in her eyes.

I stuff my fists into the pockets of my coat.

"Real men don't follow my kind all alone into the woods. Who are you?"

"Someone trying to be a real man."

Five more paces, and she still has not moved. Leaves swirl at her feet. A squirrel streaks across the forest floor behind her. And with an outstretched arm, I touch the tip of her sword.

* * *

**6.**

I remember Isley's first thing he said to me after our fight:

"Masculinity is curse, isn't it?"

Waking up to his face, enshrined in dirty sunlight diluted by the trees – and then enduring the swelling of the injuries on every muscle on my body, the biting pressure on my neck where he had nearly dismembered my entire head, and the chronic stabbing pain (which exists till this day) in the abdomen which suffered the brunt of his finishing move – seemed more a nightmare, than recovery.

"If you move you'll reopen your wounds, so stay still."

The tassels of his coat, chopped to pieces, continued to hang from my shoulders, where he had draped over me. His gesture was the last thing I remembered after the defeat.

"You are like a mother," I had said hoarsely. "You're not a man."

"You believe so, Rigardo?"

I did: "A real warrior would have killed me. A real man would have let me die with honour out there."

"You shouldn't talk so much if you want to heal."

"You're not a real man," I had said.

Isley bent in, his locks pulled behind his ears. His words were supposedly philosophical:

"Which is why I won."

* * *

**7.**

The gesture is enough for her to make the first move. The sword retracts, then flings itself towards my fingertip. And all it takes is a second – the swipe hits air – and she is exposed and open –

Five paces become three. Still I know – I know she will counter. And she does, she deflects the fist aiming at her wrist with her elbow. Enough force ensues for her to bring the blade back at me. This time there is no escape – I palm the Claymore – and wrench it upwards. She struggles with the blade. And stumbles.

I catch her by the wrist to steady her.

"What are you doing?" she demands. She regains control of the blade, and bursts into a safe distance. Three paces become twenty once again.

She is flushed. She is beautiful.

"Stay away from me!" she warns.

"No."

"What?"

"It will be easier if you drop the sword and come to me. It will be over in a moment, I promise." And I feel expectation creep into every battery of muscle. But it is suppressed, for now.

"You're an awakened one, aren't you?"

Truth strikes at me relentlessly. But the façade of a man, a real man, needs to be maintained. And it is: truth privileges her with information only I can erase, here and now.

"Does it matter?"

"I'd rather die than –"

Death is, truly, overrated too. So all talk of death needs to be shushed. Twenty paces become ten, ten become five, five become two, and two become one –

My right hand steadies itself on her shoulder, where beneath the slab of armour, I can feel the blood and, tense and warm. My fingers rest at the exposed side of her neck.

My other hand snuggles into her blade-carrying hand: two different sets of palms, clasping one blade.

"Try not to move," I advise her.

When she screams, I smother it with a mouth: it has been a very long time since I have tasted flesh this fresh.

* * *

**8.**

"Why are you doing this?"

She has a lithe, lean body, hardly a curve, but as my hands explore her back, they roam over muscle, the tightness of raw flesh open to the cold.

(I have always believed in precautions, and judging from her feisty resistance, I decide then to make the necessary adjustments: the removal both legs from her body, at the knee, inhibiting potential regeneration).

As I claw at her in the still dry leaf-litter, a pool of pine-needles amassed in between the tree's roots. Beneath her tunic, her flesh is, unlike her arms and neck, pale, snowy, warm.

I check my own insidious energy, swallowing hard to prevent it from slipping into her presence. And as I burrow deep into her navel, both fingers and tongue find the landmark she carries: an endless maze of canyons slashed into flesh, a spider-like web of a thousand smaller tributaries. The outermost tip of my tongue follows the patterns, draining through these streams, and sensation flows through the back of my mouth, a river of once-dammed and unknown sense finally burning into prominence.

"Please prepare yourself," I say. "This might hurt."

She starts to weep. Her hands stamp to my shoulders, at which my response is:

"You shouldn't – it makes things overly dramatic."

A drainage path – led by my tongue – flows into her trembling mouth, and over her lips and into perfect contact with her shy tongue. It digs through saliva frothing at the base of her teeth. Drinking I taste – like a flood of spices and a rush of pain – the moist, blurred-blunt, dense swathe of milk.

She does not flinch as I try to shift my weight to make her comfortable, positing myself at where she would feel least pain. But she does not appreciate the gesture, and with her remaining limbs she attempts to scramble aside.

I feel something burn –a ferocious pulse from within my gut, like indigestion, but sharper – as I restrain her movement. With a palm I catch her by the throat, and exert force.

"This will be over in a minute," I reassure her.

She gags, her tongue flipping on her lips; at this moment, I apply flesh to flesh, and with an expectant tug on my torso the burning sensation within my crotch filters away into smoother, much more desirable friction. Friction so sharp and grating that soon my entire torso is splashed with crimson.

* * *

**9.**

The next time I see Isley, he is having another round of drinks, at the same table. The entire inn is deserted, probably because it is late, and the woods are full of unpleasant creatures at twilight. The master has left a wick, set in the centre of an oily puddle, burning. Approaching, I see Isley's coat is pulled open at the side to reveal a slice of his lean, exposed frame. He looks as how I had left him. But now Priscilla is with him.

"Had your fun?" he says, barely looking up from his repetitive, ridiculous ritual – an absentminded sips from the flagon, a halfhearted stroking of Priscilla's chin.

"She was weak."

"I hope you cleared everything. I hate it when you leave scraps for the crows. Or the yoma," he turns to be finally. "They're unpleasant creatures both."

"At least I still have it." And I cannot resist: "At least I 'm not screwing a kid."

When Isley sets down his flagon, I'm certain I can feel it – the smallest flare of yoki, the slightest switch into rage. But he hides it so excellently, so smoothly, that as he strokes her, Priscilla curls up to him, her fragile hands scouring through his cloak to find exposed skin, her head upturned to face him. Isley trails a finger across her collarbone, peeking out through the undone top of her cloak.

"At least she appreciates it," he says. And Priscilla strikes her tongue, all the way down to where Isley's crotch is patiently waiting for its application.

_**END**_


	9. King

**King**

* * *

_  
This one-shot was written for Tempest35 on the Animesuki forums. We were trading Raki x Miria fics, & this was my contribution. Thanks to Tempest35, Shiek927 & MisterJb for their comments._

* * *

**1.**

Raki does not wait till dawn officially arrives: when the east is still moodily purplish, he relieves himself off his bed – the first linen bed he has slept on in almost five years – and goes outside. He takes his sword along with him, not because there is any danger, but because it has become a stubborn habit.

The crickets give pause to their singing as he tracks out near the trees beside the buildings. He selects for himself a comfortable spot; the tree will offer him enough shade if the weather becomes too hot and he uses its ancient, swollen roots as a bumper. Here, with the scent of dew on wet grass filling his nostrils, he removes his supplies from his leather pack and eats his morning meal in silence.

In his leather pack he counts one – no, two more encrusted slabs of smoked venison still remaining. He had, after all, prepared for a very long war.

The town comes alive soon after. A hunchbacked shepherd, son of a man he once knew when he was younger, wields a twisted staff as he crosses Raki's vision with his flock, looking like a performer leading a pack of bleating circus animals. Milkmaids and women appear at doorways, their vessels unsteady with liquid. Men on their way to the fields curse at their wives, spit and throw their sticks over their shoulders like warriors eager for war.

But none acknowledge him. They do not meet his eye. They do not step within ten strides of him reclining form, making detours, as if avoiding someone with the plague. Only a stray dog regards him with any neutral interest, shaking his nose at Raki's attention and then strutting away, deciding the man by the big tree is not worthy of further investigation.

It is until the sun is blazing, perched amongst the leafy arms of trees, when someone finally approaches him. He taps his foot over the root, and Raki flickers a nod at him.

"The townspeople are starting to talk," the man says.

"About time. I was beginning to get worried," Raki shoots back.

Both men agree with the statement, their faces slipping into a short chuckle.

"No, Raki, _seriously_." He bends lower and plants himself beside the roots, his shoulder straddling a distorted lump in the tree's frame. "They don‎'t believe what you told them. No amount of my persuasion and you being a local son is converting them."

He mows a hand through his hair in faux exhaustion:

"I mean, _who_ shows up in the middle of the night with a young child and a chopped-up woman, and everything was the work of wild animals?"

In consequence, Raki understands that he does not like to lie. But, war or not, he still required a place to rest and someone to nurse his travelling companion's wounds.

"It was a lie waiting to be torn apart by rumours," Raki himself admits, aloud this time.

"And your little _daughter_ is – unusual, you know that?"

Raki cannot help but allow a smile to edge into his face. "Priscilla, you mean? What has she been doing?"

"That girl is standing in the sun by the entrance to the town." The man blinks into a far-off distance. "And telling everyone who passes to prepare the way of the new king."

"I'm no king," Raki sighs. He stares at his sword. "Hardly a prince of peace –"

"I don't really care what you are, but tonight some of the folk are planning to discuss you staying here with the mayor. You bring bad luck, they say – that you are somehow responsible for all the burning smoke that rises from the east –"

"I'm just a beggar waiting for the keys to a kingdom – waiting for the day the poor can inherit it."

And Raki tilts his head away – towards the sun, which slices his forehead into half-shadow. He hopes this will tell the man he is done talking for today.

His friend claps him on the shoulder, a weary gesture, full of tense uncertainty. He backs away, and Raki sees that he struggles with putting in a last word, trying his best to allow the vocabulary to form in his throat, as if he is biting on an invisible spoon:

"The woman you brought in last night is dying, Raki."

* * *

**2.**

When the sunlight begins to slant and the heat makes wavy his vision, Raki decides it is time to walk. Instead of going back to the tavern, he moves deeper into the woods, heading to where he smells water. His sword he carries blatantly from his right hand, like a divining rod. When he does find the stream, it is a stagnant pool fed by a trickle of water. He strips and dunks himself into it, wading; the water barely covers his abdomen.

By the time he returns to the town, preparations for the evening are underway. Night watchmen try to stare him down. He settles into a pace, and enters the tavern while the attendants beginning lighting the candles and tapers.

There are women whispering at him outside the room. He knows, already, they are afraid of him and the woman in the room. He had seen them the previous night, afraid to touch or dress the wounds – and he sees them now, fearful to even watch over one whom death seems to loiter around patiently, like the shadows on the timber walls.

The room still smells of blood. Not a single candle has been lit. The basins the women used to soak their towels are still tinged with red. The window has been shut, as if to contain something hideous within the room. Raki forces it open. But the room becomes darker: the sky outside has simply given up all its light.

He spots movement in the covers. It is a signal for him to be at her bedside:

"Miria."

Her eyes blossom in the dark, irreversibly gold. Even under the sheets, he sees her right arm end abruptly in a stump. He tries not to think of the meat hanging off the shoulder; it is a reminder that he arrived on the battlefield too late.

"Miria," he says again, softly, and she responds with a jerk, her other arm shooting out to claw at air. "No. Don't."

"Raki – Raki," she mutters. "Where – are you?"

He massages her forehead; it is hot to the touch.

"I'm here, Miria. Shhh…there's only me. No one else."

"I – had another dream, Raki," she says. Her voice, though inconsistent, has lost none of the strength that made her so powerful before. "I saw Clare."

"No – let's not talk about Clare," he tells her. But he has trouble forcing himself to take his own words seriously. "What's done is done."

"But – but I could – could not – she said – said –"

Veins immediately flood her face. Raki hesitates but throws his arms around Miria's shoulders, and pulls her to him. He feels the sweaty wetness of her bare back, and his fingers outline the scars map her body. When she appears to choke, her entire body begins to tremble, her entire body giving off that ill sensation he knows is yoki –

But he holds her even tighter and says: "Shh…It's all right. I'm here – I'm here."

There is a spasm, and Miria stops shaking. He can feel the normal pace of her breathing revive, her blocked nose sniffing.

"She said she will be waiting for me in hell – she said she will be waiting with Hilda – with all the friends I killed –"

Raki does not release his grip. Sweat, or tears, begin to slip down his neck. He eases her carefully, her chin stabbing into his shoulder.

"Clare would never say that," he says. He pauses, and then utters what he knows she should have said when he first found Miria, in the ruins of the Organization's headquarters, when he had arrived too late for that final battle:

"She had already awakened.

"It was something that she would've wanted you to do."

He wants to look Miria in the face, but the mere mention of Clare disturbs him. He is not prepared, himself, to think about her. And neither is he ready, then, to absorb Miria's guilt.

"Raki – this is all –"

He holds tighter again, circling his hands around her, burrowing his face into her hair. They still smell of hemlock, of elderberry and spring in the countryside, amidst the death and ruin and dead warriors strewn like flannel seeds as far as his eyes can remember – Priscilla going among the corpses to help point out which ones were dead and which ones were going to awaken –

When he faces her, she stares completely beyond him. So he presses his face to her cheek and breathes deeply. Miria does not stir, only her chopped-off right arm squirms, ruffling the clothes on his back. He holds onto her, and she to him, as if they are the only two people left in the entire world. He holds onto her because he is, really, afraid she will disappear like the light, too.

* * *

**3.**

A soft wind on his fringe wakes him. It is dark, hours to go till dawn, but he can clearly see Priscilla watching him.

"Has the king chosen his new queen?" she asks, the tone of her voice laced with a high sense of wonder, as if a storyteller were narrating a story to children.

"Priscilla," he reaches out from the bed and messes her hair. "Can you feel how Miria is doing?"

The Abyssal in her small form snakes her hand around Raki's head and rests it on Miria's. She lowers it to Miria's neck, and then to the bandaged, but still bloody stub of the arm.

"She'll live," she says. "For more days."

Raki gets up from the bed; he sets aside Miria's uninjured arm, which has looped itself around his waist. He dresses in the dark, and leans on the window ledge. He looks to the east, where he knows, in the dark, dark columns of smoke continue to rise towards heaven, an eternal burning of hatred, an endless karma of wars and revenge.

"The hands of a king are the hands of a healer," Priscilla says to him.

"If they were, I would've healed myself long ago."

He takes the basin of water left untouched since the women cleaned Miria's wounds, and pours it over himself. The splash echoes the room, but Miria does not wake. As he dries himself with towels caked and dried with Miria's blood, he notices Priscilla hastily pulling the covers over Miria's bare, almost luminous skin.

"From now on, I will serve the king and his new queen," she says.

* * *

NOTES:

For those who know, "the hands of the king are the hands of a healer" comes from J.R.R Tolkien's The Return of the King.

Edited: 7 Jul 09


	10. The Fall of Acre

**THE FALL OF ACRE**

**1.**

It is always snowing in the North.

With the sound of her teammates' steps flying off the walls, Number Seven "Five-Swing" Eva is choking, gasping for air. The world has, unexpectedly, turned a powerless white and for a short, brief interval she does not know where she is. As the dead weight in her arms materializes – it is her sword! – she stumbles around and sees brick – snow – brick – snow. She strokes the surface as if touching something solid will kick-start her sanity

It doesn't. Instead wherever her hand goes, a silvery crimson dash marks its wake.

As her vision solidifies, she can make out the clumped splashes of snow from the blurred mirages her mind conjures. Is this absence of colour an instinctive response to being injured, or a preventive measure against being further wounded? She clamps her eyelids down as tight as she can, and when everything painlessly goes dark, she hopes darkness will give way to something more than just black, white and red.

"Captain! CAPTAIN!"

At the sound of a human tongue thrashing in a human's throat her eyelids stammer in disbelief. A warm, disaffected figure, crisp with exertion and spotted with snowflakes bounds itself into her face. They came back for me? Stupid idiots, she wants to say.

A slippery, mushy object fastens itself to the underside of her arm; immediately she has a vision of a creature with scales and a sword-tipped tongue, and she tries to swat the pressure on her arm away. But it hangs on even tighter, and its force is so secure it dangles her in the air and plants her on her feet. Something is breathing into her face – and friction bursts from her cheeks – like a lover's desperate, last embrace – and a thumb-shaped blockade screens the light from her eyes.

"Captain Eva – No – it's me – it's Lucia –"

When the light returns, she is inhaling the reeking stench of unwashed armour and the sweaty body underneath it. Lucia? There's some other scent curling unconsciously to batter her senses: a filthy, bestial, odour –

"I thought I told you to leave –" she tries to say with professional non-commitment, but it ends up sounding as if there were something stuck in her nose.

"Shut up and walk, Captain!"

The response hurls into her like a cuff in the chin, and when her teammates releases the grip on her arm, Eva sees Lucia's face properly for the first time: oily, her complexion as pale as chalk, the bright flower of a wound like an eyepatch over her left eye, the drilled-down brows which, Eva thinks, would be a turn-on for her any other day, but today – because today is really a bad day.

Her feet start to follow Lucia. And then the entire cellar crumbles to an orchestra of a thousand monsters singing.

**

* * *

  
**

**2.**

"Do you know why an Awakened Being hunt requires four warriors?"

She asks this every time she is deployed to go on a hunt. More because as the only single-digit among the hunters she has the experience, privilege and right to ask questions and demand answers. And, this hunt (now, she can think of it as a hunt gone wrong) had not been an exception. Eva had sat at their rendezvous – a cattle ranch just beyond the obscurely-named mountain range which ran like a snowy beard along the border of the northern lands of Alphonse – in lotus position, her blade stacked at a perfect right angle to the ground, one hand resting on her thigh.

"Two warriors to hold the monster down. One to slice its throat. And the last one to run off and get help if the other three fail."

Her teammates waited, the drowsy protests of bulls and cows being led into the shed for slaughter, and performed the mandatory introductions. All had been on at least one Awakened Being hunt. All had, in her finely-honed opinion, a reasonable attitude to their being here, even though they had no choice. None, however, were like her, having had the tragic personal history of growing up in the North.

Lucia, Kate, Dana. She did not like names – there were too many names cluttered in her memory of teammates who never made it past their first Awakened Being hunt in the North. So she had no intention of remembering them, at least for now.

"I just have one rule for hunts," she said. Her back arched and her hands on her lap, sage-like, she looked down on them with the wisdom of crawling through snow to breathe for air and of days without any hope of light. "You will follow my orders down to the every syllable I say. Obey me and you live. Otherwise, I will make sure you will never go on another hunt like this ever."

"Understood?"

When neither of them said a word, she nodded at the imagined consent. She shouldered her Claymore and stalked on their trail towards the mountains entrenched in fog and snow.

**  
**

* * *

**3.**

Eva poles her hand upright. A viscous hailstorm of stone and snow creeps up towards her fingers but stops short of burying her entire hand. She thinks: lying here in the rubble is like the perfect sleep I have yet to have after all these years.

But the roar of the monsters outside thuds into her ears, and she smashes her other hand through the wreckage. On her first time standing without help after the ambush her back creaks like a rusted sword coming out of its sheath.

"We need to get into cover!" someone, one of her team members, shouts back.

Eva sees the Awakened Being dart from the rooftops down at her, its face feline, eyes ablaze. In the empty square of the destroyed building, there is no way for her to run. But, then again, at last there is space to swing her Claymore –

She hits the Awakened Being right in the side of its forehead. Its partially severed temple splays across the snow. _Five swings and it's all over_. She doesn't need even three. The Claymore whirls in her hand. Her wrist strains like a stringed instrument, muscles tenses; the blade strikes the monster's face, splintering it into pieces.

But when Eva looks up, she sees ten more Awakened Beings roosting on the rooftops. Three more have crowded the snow-slipped alley. They all charge at once. She thinks: there's no space in the street to fight.

* * *

**4.**

Their encampment had been nothing spectacular. At the bare edge of the mountain pass which led into Alphonse, with a glacier leaking like an untended wound from the hills to their south, they finally stopped after almost two days' of traveling. Eva had taken the first watch, and ordered her team to rest for the final leg of their journey.

At the third watch of the night, one of the warriors – Lucia, was it? – broke cover and joined her out of the ledge overlooking the glacier.

"Captain," she acknowledged her. Eva saw the warrior had her ponytail loose, the pockets of unshaved hair lining her sideburns, her armour missing.

"I thought I ordered you to rest," Eva said.

"The other members of your team are not following your orders, either."

Eva regained her footing and stuck her head out into the slit of a cave. In the cloistered darkness of a half-dead fire, she could make out the murky forms of one of the warriors – Dana, was it? – her downturned face over her teammate's shiny frame, as if taking a deep drink from a well. Eva could see, in spite of the dark, their bare hands and arms tangled like overgrown bramble.

She allowed herself a sigh, then returned to her position.

She nodded to Lucia: "I do not interfere with the lives of my team members,"

Lucia betrayed a half-laugh. "Yes, Captain."

Eva was not in the mood to contend with a cocky double-digit warrior. Multiple encounters had taught her they were the most flamboyant, had the most erratic attitude and were not worth their weight in words on the field of battle. She hunkered down deeper in her cloak, letting the wind bash her only on her face.

A full blown silence had passed between them before Lucia's voice, slightly less confident and half-eaten by the wind, started again:

"They say you're the strategist in the top ten," she had mouthed silence. "How much of what they say back in Staff is true, Captain?"

* * *

**5.**

"There are two things you need to understand about the hunt," Eva made herself clear before they set off the following morning. "Engagements in urban areas are different from your usual scream and slash fights –"

It had not been told to her, but she had anticipated it anyway: the town had not been evacuated, the headman of the town put under the assumption they were dealing with yoma. All that indicated there were problems within the town was the plain of disturbed earth on the town's outskirts, the snow disrupted and fresh earth showing like rotten skin beneath badly cut wooden crosses.

As with all cities haunted by monsters, the square had been deserted and the gates unmanned. People had been so afraid to come out of their houses that their doors were buried in a metre of snowfall. Feral dogs with ribcages showing like teeth on their bodies roamed the streets. The mayor sat in his home and spoke with them through the window, his voice indistinguishable from the croaking hum of wind blasting through the empty streets.

Still, the town itself was a congested stack of stone buildings built under the shadow of a mighty ledge. Its southern edge ended in a quarry-like outcrop of granite. The town had been built into the mountain, they were told, so much so that from afar, it looked as if a chunk of rock had been blown out of from side of the mountain and scattered into small pieces all over the valley.

The streets were awkwardly narrow, houses were built at irrationally sharp angles to the street and an entire network of smaller alley used for rubbish disposal branched out from each street like veins on a person's arm.

"– And the second thing you should realise is in a town is: you prepare for an ambush at every turn."

It had been relatively easy to locate the Awakened Being, or at least isolate its hostile, exposed signature. Eva decided it was best to start their mission immediately, since she had suspected a storm was coming. Asked how she knew, she replied northerners simply can sense these things.

They had tracked down the fluctuating signal to the edge of town, where the houses were so tightly packed they appeared to be huddled in a conspiracy against them. At the stone archway built like a gate to the underworld, Eva halted their hunting party.

Seeking for traces of yoki hiding deep within towns was an ability she had developed during her years posted to the north, so she felt overly sensitive to even the faintest differences in yoki amongst her own team. At this very moment, their Claymores drawn, she herself feeling a hot syringe of adrenaline pushing itself past her own yoki, she collected the feelings of her team – Dana the only one alert and waiting – Kate's eyes flitting between the dark entrance into the street and Dana – and finally, Lucia, nervously fingering her blade while trying to look as though she had the benefit of experience.

"Last thing – keep the fight under a roof –"

"We play to our strengths. We play to our environment –"

Sure enough, Eva predicted it correctly: an Awakened Being, hiding behind a wall within one of the houses, waiting to ambush them. So Eva ordered Lucia and Dana to charge the building, while she and Kate hacked down the wall. The monster, stunned that its moves had been successfully read, attempted to knock the entire house down.

"If anything fails, the Awakened Being will try to do the thing it only knows how to do: take away our cover and try to kill some of us in the wreckage –"

As the house crumbled under its release of almost a hundred scythes from its fingers, Eva and Kate went to head it off directly, while Lucia and Dana took cover in a nearby house. Feigning defeat, they took to retreating into the rigged building, down a cellar and into a corridor open to the sky. As the Awakened Being followed them down, it found itself surrounded on both sides by thick stone walls meant to keep wine cool in the winter, and hemmed in from above by two levels of wooden flooring.

At the signal, they ambushed the creature: Lucia and Dana from the top, Eva and Kate rushing down from either side of the corridor.

"Follow my plan down to the word and we all survive –"

As Lucia dealt the killing blow, it seemed so simple.

And then the entire house came crashing down.

* * *

**6.**

"I'm not a strategist in the sense of the word."

"Are you trying to give me a lecture in vocabulary, Captain?"

She had sighed, pulling down her cloak to reveal her full face. "You should stop acting as if you're going to become a single digit. Kill an Awakened Being first –"

"Whatever you say – but I want to know why everyone says you're so strong –"

As she blunders into a wall, her shoulder clocks itself out of place. She falls face first into the snow again and her senses are burned into a whiteness so repulsive she is on her feet again as soon as she can shake the white away. The Awakened Being advancing on me raises its tail – from where she stands it looks like a flat palm laced with spines – and as it comes down, Eva recovers just in time to return a strike.

But she retreats before the monster turns to meet her again, fumbling into the sharp, upturned surfaces of chunks of rubble. She races into another alley, her huge blade slapping at the ground as her hands punch forward with a repetitive precision. There, at the end, Dana is dragging Kate away from where Lucia is single-handedly battling an Awakened Being.

Judging by the flesh and blood scattered in a halo around Lucia, Eva can tell she has at least slaughtered two Awakened Beings – perhaps something the absence of such feral desperation would not have allowed her to do. She feels a sting of pride for the girl she had labeled prude earlier. But, no, now is not the time – the monsters closing in behind her, Eva seizes Dana's shattered shoulder and forces her aside –

"You know every warrior develops her own technique, right?"

"Yeah."

"There's a reason why I'm called Five-Swing," Eva had chosen to pause. She felt blowing her own trumpet was idiotic without a willing or at least convinced listener.

"Go on Captain. Tell me."

"I have this – technique – that's a kind of close-range move to get me out of bad situations –"

To make sure Dana stays down, Eva jabs her with the hilt of her Claymore, briefly muttering "sorry" before she yells at Lucia to duck.

She lets her wrist vibrate, the yoki flooding it making her muscle flex, curl and then the pain begins to drive her sword into release. Lucia takes a moment to see this; in her moment of distraction, the Awakened Being claps her in the face with an uppercut. Eva sees her fall back into the stop, her nose bent at an impossibly obtuse angle.

By now her right wrist is beginning to tremble so much she thinks she will divulge her own fingernails to the force. Fastening her second hand to the hilt she pushes the sword at the Awakened beings coming up at her from behind. Her first swing almost carries her with her sword, but she cuts through everything: flesh, bone, carapace. And she makes it two, three, four –

At the fifth swing, the buildings around her release their stones and glass, and their wood and everything that makes them solid floats to the over-swing of her Claymore in a whirlwind of debris. The surrounding chorus of Awakened Beings falling to her swing rise and then fall, plunging to a post-destruction silence, nothing but the wind supplying the only sound.

Eva collapses, sweat clouding her vision, the cold rapidly burning at it. She throws a glance across to Dana, who is standing, a longitudinal bruise sloping down her face where she had been hit. Beyond her, is Lucia, walking, her face incredulous, the recipient of miraculous conversion from her disbelief –

"Why don't we have a short spar and you show it to me now?" she had asked me.

And Eva, tempted as she was to silence Lucia once and for all, had taken her Claymore, still sheathed, and laid it astride her reclining form:

"You give me an Awakened's head first."

"Captain, you must be joking – I've never even been able to fight one on equal terms –"

"Then shut it and let me sleep."

She is not sure what she should do next, but now she is running. They need to get as far away from the accursed town as far as possible – that is the new mission – and she needs to tell her handler that the Awakened Beings are acting like a hunting party, hunting Claymores –

When the pressure of the yoki becomes too unbearable, she finally relents: she stops the weary troupe of wounded to stare back at where the town was. A horizon of restless yoma energy arches her view of the town like a sunset against a backdrop stone-grey mountains. She cannot see what is coming, so she draws her blade, and –

"Kate is down!" Lucia shouts.

The girl has bled out, a carpet of lush crimson wrapping her body as snowflakes provide the ornamental décor. But what, Eva thinks, can she do now, with the sun about the set over the plains so wrecked with snow?

A flush of yoki. And something hits Lucia through the throat –

"Lucia!" her own voice is hoarse with pain.

What was it? She thinks. Over the rim of Lucia's sprawled form, she sees a scene so breathless she is herself paralyzed: scenery whitened by the shroud of wind-tossed snow, the frame for Awakened Beings as far as the eye can see.

When she finally turns her eyes away from the scenery, she struggles to leave Lucia and Kate behind. Dana is calling out to her, but the voice is disembodied, as if transmitted through water, more a fragment of noise rather than anything audible. Eva turns to where the plain line of the horizon is not littered with monsters, and she walks towards it, turning her back on a battle she knows is impossible to win.

Dana is shouting something; now she really wants to make her shut up, even though the wind is diluting the younger warrior's voice. She concentrates on the distant stars just above the absolute white of the land – and as she does so, the horizon inverts – just for a second – and corrects itself, her view of the sky now more prominent – she feels her chin getting cold –

What is she doing on the ground? She asks herself. Dana's voice is like an animal's now, no longer human, but screeching in a single tone that goes on and on –

Eva tries to see why she is yelling so inhumanely, and in the snow she sees what looks like a pair of legs badly scraped off at the thighs lying a few feet away. Do they belong to Dana? Eva pities the girl, but when she moves her hands to try to stabilize herself and get to her feet she understands that – coincidentally – she, too, is missing a pair of thighs, knees and feet. She reasons that this is not happening, and even if it is, she tells herself to keep calm – she lifts the awesome meaty stump of her hamstring slowly to stop the bleeding. It did not hurt yet, she thinks – but – ah, yes, now it does –

In the meantime she feels that maybe it isn't so bad at all, this lack of legs – she can finally rest from battle, breathe easy through the blank scent of snow and the copper-iron odour of her own blood. Even though it's getting cold – even though she can feel the yoma inside her thrashing for a last encore – even though the world is at last narrowing to a crushing pulse of dirty yoki she has never felt before –

But yes, she thinks as her own vision is absorbed into dusty twilight, this is comfortable (at last Dana has quieted down) – and the day is fading into a reasonable darkness, the sound of the wind a closing song –

And the devious eyes bubbling above her signal a fitful goodbye.  


* * *

_Completed: 01.09.09_

**NOTES:**

On The Fall of Acre: took some liberty on mixing timelines. And also had to come up with an identity for Eva, the most underrepresented Claymore in the top 10.

It took a year, but finally the collection comes to an end!

These 10 stories have at least 13 characters in Claymore between them, been read by a total of at least 3 beta-editors & have been submitted twice to 2 short story workshops. Most of all, I'm glad I finished this personal challenge. And I'm glad for all those who've read (even if you didn't review), because this project was born out a whim & has at least met with some purpose.

For the remaining Claymore short stories which I didn't put in this project, I'll be slowly uploading them onto as one-shots.

And, if you want to collaborate with me on another project like this, please email me. I need something to keep my writing going :)

And, lastly, to those who've helped me write better by commenting on these 10 stories: _T35, Yosei, Hell, Fenrir, Tenken, NobodyMan, Mikke, Bishou, Dreamreaper, MisterJB, Shiek & Useful Oxymoron.  
_


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